


The Place Between

by PsiCygni



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, F/M, Fake Dating, Fake Relationship, Romance, Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 01:15:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 41
Words: 308,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2369000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsiCygni/pseuds/PsiCygni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No, Gaila.  I am not, absolutely not going to walk into Commander Spock’s office and suggest that we pretend to date for an entire summer.  I mean, we… I… he’s not… I couldn’t even spend that much time with him, nor would I want to.  He’s so… he’s just really… I have professional mores, Gaila.  Standards of conduct that this… just, no.  No.  No, thank you for the idea, but no."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unlike some WIPs that I may have started and then set aside, this one I have actually written all the way to the end. It's all rough and still needs to be read through, edited, and tweaked which is why I'm not just posting it all at once, but there's no chance I'll do something like get halfway through and then walk away! I promise! And I promise that I'll update as regularly as I can and as real life allows. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

Nyota has her entire summer work schedule for her research paper planned out, with her notes collated and color coded for deadlines she plans to meet each week and with meetings with Dr. Carrick on her calendar. So, when Dr. Carrick’s wife gets transferred to Alpha Lyrae III the day after finals end, Nyota watches her carefully constructed summer crumble around her.

“I’m going to find a new advisor for this paper. Somehow. It took me so long to even find Carrick in the first place, and then to decide to focus on pluricentric use of Standard and how it relates to theories of cultural relativism that I’m not giving up just because of this. And I’m going to submit it for publication and that would be just…” Nyota trails off, imagining herself with a published paper on her resume and thinking of the Enterprise’s sleek lines, of commendations and recommendations from professors, and of Lieutenant stripes waiting for her even before graduation if she can manage to earn them. “I have to get this written this summer, I just do.”

“You’re crazy,” Gaila says from where she’s laying her bunk. She toes aside a pile of filmplasts and flexes her feet as she yawns. 

Nyota ignores her, already adding names to a list. Lieutenant Weyer or Commander Amano, maybe, and if not him then Professor Engstrom is on campus for the break between semesters. 

“I am not crazy,” she adds as she looks up Amano’s ID to send him a message.

“Tell that to the poor professor who gets stuck overseeing this project of yours.”

“I will. As soon as I find them.”

But finding a new advisor is slightly more challenging than Nyota thought it would be. 

It turns out that Weyer got reassigned to the Antares and spends forty five minutes telling Nyota about it, long after she’s slipped the filmplast with her proposal back in her bag.

Amano is on personal leave for personal reasons, taking some personal time, which Gaila immediately decides involves a clandestine trip to Risa.

Engstrom is already overseeing three other cadets’ projects and while she glances at Nyota’s outline and listens as Nyota promises that she barely needs guidance, just really a signature, she shakes her head and suggests that Nyota pursue an independent study in the fall.

“I’m already taking an expanded course load next semester,” Nyota explains. “I was really hoping to do this over the summer in order to-“

“I’m sorry, Uhura. Good luck, though. It seems like an interesting project.”

“Yes sir,” Nyota replies, straightening her back when it threatens to slump. “Thank you.”

Her Organian Society and Culture instructor, Lieutenant Commander Haught, is spending the break with his grandchildren and her Biolinguistics professor, Lieutenant Irani, is conducting research of her own. Professor Girbach who taught Xenoorthography says probably not, Commander Wakeman whose Intermediate Etymology class Nyota loved says maybe and then a day later regretfully says he can’t. Her Advanced Morphology professor, Commander Spock, informs her he’s not available before even listening to the topic of her paper.

“Beach,” Gaila says that afternoon when Nyota gets back to the dorm. “Swimming. Guys. Girls. Dating. No research, no libraries, no papers. Really, Ny, they’re all doing you a favor.”

“Hmmm.”

“Let’s go get a drink. Let’s get two. We can celebrate a long, long summer of fun, relaxation, and good old vacation here on Earth.”

“Mmmm.”

“No homework, just us at the bar. Happy hour. The happiest of all the hours.”

“Uh huh.”

“No responsibilities.”

“I’m sure.”

“Sleeping.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Hanging out with your friends.”

“That’d be great.”

“Listening to your roommate when she’s having a conversation with you.”

“Yep.”

“Not having your nose in a padd during a discussion.”

“Sure.”

“Nyota,” Gaila groans and Nyota finds the padd summarily pulled from her hands. “What are you even doing?”

“Finding an advisor for my project.”

“They all said no.”

“They all said no the first time,” Nyota corrects. “I’m not done yet.”

But trying different professors is even more disheartening, something she tries to ignore even as Gaila frowns at her with every increasing rejection. 

Lieutenant Steiger sends her an apologetic email highlighting Nyota’s academic accomplishments that would make her an honor to work with, which feels great, but he also sends his regrets that he’s not available, which makes her want to grind her teeth.

An inquiry to Commander Kiani comes back with the standard ‘Fleet form response when an officer is on a long haul voyage and out of contact, and Professor Nylund never gets back to her, which figures because Nyota’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel with him.

Engstrom says no, again, Irani really is too busy, and Girbach, it turns out, isn’t actually qualified to oversee such a complex project, so even while Nyota congratulates herself on finding research that is above the skill set of a commissioned officer, she still feels a sinking in her chest at the thought of yet another professor who can’t work with her. Commander Spock returns a one-line email saying he remains previously engaged for the summer months and she groans and tosses her padd on her bed, scrubbing her hands over her face.

“You know how in first year orientation they list all the things that make a good Starfleet officer?”

“Nyota, they all said no.”

“Dedication, perseverance, patience, endurance.”

“Ny, do it next semester. Do it next year.”

“Diligence. Willingness to see a project through.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“I’m going to ask them all again.”

“You are not.”

“No, I am. I’m one of the best students in our year, my topic is interesting and relevant to the current focus of research at the Academy and Starfleet, and with all the new trade routes opening up because of the Ras Alhague Treaty we just signed with-“

“-I am not listening. Mostly because my ears will bleed if I hear anything else about politics-”

“- The Ambassadors from Saiph Prime, Starfleet could use more officers trained in sociolinguistics. You’re the one who’s always saying this, that we rely so heavily on Standard and we assume everyone speaks it like a native speaker does, but-“

“-I cannot hear you-”

“-Well, take the pillow off your head. And it’s an important treaty, Gaila, without it the Saiph’s wouldn’t be in the Federation, and-“

“I’m dying.”

“-You’re fine. It’s just, it’s important. Really important that if we’re all out there on these missions that we’re taking into account biological, social, and cultural differences in our speech patterns and word choices and-“

“I have some choice words for you. Bar. Beer. Wine. Tequila, Nyota. Tequila. Consider it Orion for ‘you are going to have a nervous breakdown if you never relax.’”

Nyota sighs and sits heavily on her bed. “When I find an advisor, we’ll go out to celebrate.”

“Really?” Gaila asks, perking up. “Or is this that thing where you say you’ll go out and have fun but you actually go to the library instead?”

“That is fun,” Nyota mutters.

“As much fun as badgering professors into working with you?”

“Shut up,” Nyota sighs, which just makes Gaila smile at her.

“Nah. Orions are biolinguisticsocialculturalxenoly predetermined towards talking. Good thing I got stuck with a communications track cadet for a roommate.”

“It is a good thing. Also, that’s not a word.” 

“Wow. Really. It isn’t? That’s not a word? I had no idea, Ny, so, so glad that you-“

“Are so proficient at linguistics that not only can I identify made up words my insufferable roommate creates, but also find an advisor for my research project? Thanks, Gaila. I love you, too.”

Leaving Gaila watching a holvid, Nyota tries Lieutenant Cantos, Professor Trussot, and Lieutenant Commander Damadr’s offices, but they’re already shut up for the summer, which leaves Commander Spock as the only instructor in the xenolinguistics department who might still be around. Not that she’s asked him, since he doesn’t exactly engender casual discussion in the break room, but she’s pretty sure that whatever he’s working on is here on campus.

Still, she hesitates before walking down the hall to his door but finally decides that the worst thing he can do is say no a third time. 

When she gets closer, the chatter of conversation coming down the hall is nearly impossible to attribute to his office, since while other professors often have bits of dialogue playing or snippets of recordings playing, or are hosting students or other professors for a meeting, walking past the Commander’s door is usually an exercise in listening to near silence. But when she reaches his office, she finds the door open and more people standing in his office than she’s ever seen in there. The handful of times she went to his office hours in over the last semester to talk about a paper or quiz, she got the distinct impression that nobody else ever stopped by. 

She recognizes one of the Ambassadors from Saiph Prime, and to her surprise, standing next to the tall, willowy humanoid, is none other than Captain Pike.

“Sorry, sirs,” she immediately says when he and the Commander both turn to look at her. She tries to back away before she can intrude further. “I’ll come back another time.”

“She will no do!” the Ambassador says, pointing a long, tapered finger at Nyota and turning shrewd, dark eyes on her that feel strangely piercing. 

“I apologize,” Nyota says carefully in Saiphian. She’s only studied the language a bit since the Academy library only has padds with introductory levels on it, but it’s simple enough and the lexical tones aren’t that hard to master, so she squares her shoulders and soldiers onward despite how off putting the Ambassador’s words were, plus how disconcerting the race is in general, with their leathery gray skin and completely black eyes with no discernable irises or pupils. “This one does not know the offense this one has caused, but this one apologizes for the interruption,” she says as politely as she can, hoping she used the correct word for ‘interruption’ and not ‘table.’

The Ambassador tilts her head slightly, her long, black hair swinging with the motion, before she turns from Nyota to look at Captain Pike again. 

“She is solitary. As is your Commander. We expected better options from your Federation,” the Ambassador says, her voice tinny through the translator.

“Your Excellence,” Captain Pike says, slow and careful. “You requested that you work with a Vulcan, specifically. Commander Spock is among our most esteemed officers and he-“

“No!” The Ambassador’s tone is cold and sharp through her translator. “He is forsaken.”

“He is… what?” Pike asks, glancing at the Commander, who just looks back at him with a blank expression.

“He will not do. You will not do. She will not do,” the Ambassador says and shakes her head, her hair swaying across her back. “I will depart.”

“Ambassador, please,” Pike says. “Perhaps if you explain, we can-“

“Bring me one who is combined!”

“I’m not… I’m not sure as to-“

The Ambassador makes a clicking noise and the universal translator gives an error beep instead translating it, but Nyota gets the distinct impression that it’s akin to a sigh. 

She glides out, her robes billowing, and Nyota hastily steps to the side to get out of her way. 

When she’s gone, her footsteps fading down the hall and her robes snapping behind her as she turns a corner, Pike rubs at his forehead for a long moment. 

“Damn dilitium crystals," he mutters. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. “Mr. Spock.”

“Captain?”

“Fix this.”

Pike brushes past Nyota and is through the door before the Commander can finish saying ‘yes sir.’

Complete silence follows his departure and Nyota stands with her back pressed against the doorframe, wondering if she has to say anything before she, too, leaves.

Before she can decide, the Commander looks up from his desk and pins her with that sharp gaze she remembers so well from his lectures. He's intimidating on the best of days, and though his steady gaze is reinforcing how he doesn’t incite the type of rapport and ease she enjoys with other faculty, she tries to focus on how he's always been helpful and patient with any questions she's brought to him.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can come back another time, sir. I didn’t intend to interrupt.”

“You have already expressed that sentiment, Cadet.”

“I- yes.”

The silence stretches and she runs her finger along the edge of the filmplast hand, before she realizes she's doing it and makes her hands stay still.

He hasn’t looked away from her and doesn’t look like he intends on dismissing her, so she swallows and says, “I came to ask you, again, whether you’d consider serving as an advisor for my project, Commander. Lieutenant Carrick had to transfer quite suddenly, and without him I don’t have a professor to work with on this paper.”

“I am aware,” the Commander says, his voice so cool and so dismissive that she considers just giving him an apology and stepping backwards through the door, letting it close between them. 

It would be so easy to just walk away from the slight discomfort and awkwardness of the room, but that would also mean walking away from one of her last chances to do this paper this summer, so she tightens her grip on her filmplast and straightens her back.

“I don’t need much oversight, just really someone to sign the forms for the department, and-“

“I am not predisposed to advising a project without an opportunity to provide adequate input and guidance. Perhaps another faculty member would allow you the flexibility you desire.”

“No, sir. I mean, of course, but I just meant that if you don’t have a lot of time, I don’t necessarily need-“

“If I have not made myself clear, I will continue to explain the matter. However it should be apparent that I cannot serve as your faculty advisor,” he says with that same, smooth tone he takes with students who have clearly not done the reading, the tone that suggests that not only does he not have any interest in the current discussion, he has no intention of allowing it to continue. 

She feels her cheeks heat and draws a deep breath, trying to push the angry, embarrassed jump in her stomach down.

“Of course,” she makes herself say.

She slides her filmplast back into her bag, focusing on situating it between two padds she needs to return to the library and the third padd holding the rest of her research she had hoped to show to the Commander. When she’s sure she’s calmer and less flustered from his rebuke, she looks back up at him and says, “Have a pleasant summer, Commander. And if you think of anyone who might be available for this project, if it’s not too much trouble I’d love to know.”

He nods, and is already turning back to his padd as she walks out of his door.

Only when she’s a half dozen steps down the corridor does she allow herself to close her eyes and let out a long breath. She knows on some level that Gaila’s right that if she really can’t find a professor to work with her, there’s not much she can do about that. But that doesn’t temper the burning itch that this project has produced in her, nor does it ease the anxious jump in throat every time she thinks about an unproductive summer. She knows how that will look on her resume, a gaping hole of several months of either no work, or less consequential work even if she can find something so last minute. Other cadets might be content with time off between semesters, but Nyota’s not. She came to the Academy to do her best for four years, and to graduate either at the top of her class or as near to it as she is capable of. The idea of something so happenstance as her advisor’s wife being transferred to a new assignment makes a knot form in her stomach.

She’s so lost in thought that she doesn’t hear the chime of her comm until it’s rung at least twice and by the time she digs it out of her bag, it’s ringing a third time. She flips it open, scanning the automated message sent from the Academy Library that one of the texts she has checked out has been requested. She’s not surprised to see that it’s the Saiphian cultural reference and dictionary she picked up earlier that week, since it’s been in high demand with all the Saiphs who have been coming to Earth ever since the Ras Alhague Treaty was signed, but she is surprised to see the ID of who requested it.

She turns back down the empty hall, retracing her steps even as she digs into her bag for the relevant padd.

“Here,” she says, wrapping her knuckles on the Commander’s doorframe to announce her presence, not that he couldn’t have heard her coming since the building is so silent with so many cadets and officers gone for the summer.

Commander Spock looks down at the padd she lays on his desk, and then up at her from beneath slanted eyebrows.

“I was not aware that you were the cadet in possession of that padd.”

“I figured it was rather timely to learn their language. And speaking of timely, take it now so that neither of us has to walk to the library.”

“It will still be checked out under your name.”

“Don’t lose it,” she suggests. “Consider it a little extra efficiency in your day, since I hear you’re pretty busy this summer.”

“You hear I am…” he trails off, a small crease forming between his eyebrows as his head tilts to the side. “You are aware I am involved with other work this summer. Is that what you are referring to?”

“Uh, yes.” Her fingers tighten on the strap of her bag and she tries not to wince at her own flippancy. “It’s a saying, an expression. I guess I was being a bit… sarcastic.”

He pauses for a moment, still just watching her with those dark, piercing eyes. “I see.”

“I’m sorry, sir, it was out of line.”

“You are distressed because you have not found an advisor for your project,” he says and it’s not really a question so she doesn’t nod.

Instead, she ignores his guess – his correct guess at that- and gestures to the padd.

“If you’re requisitioning that to look up the word that the Ambassador kept repeating and which the universal translator didn’t have a reference for, it amounts to the Standard definition of ‘single’, as in someone who isn’t involved in a relationship.” 

His gaze drops to the dictionary so that she can’t see his reaction, not that she imagines there would be much of one. He thumbs on the padd and she watches him flick through the chapter she had most recently been reading.

“I’ll… leave you to it,” she says eventually when he shows no sign of looking up at her again. She backs out of his office once more, the hall as empty and quiet as it was the last time, her footsteps echoing dully as she walks away.

It isn’t until she’s pushing her dinner around her plate in the mess hall and trying to focus on the conversation Gaila’s having with her that she really allows the despondency to settle in.

“This isn’t going to work,” she says to her salad, stabbing at a tomato that just rolls to the other side of her plate.

Gaila picks up the tomato, takes the fork from Nyota’s hand, and spears it on the tines for her. 

“There you go.”

Nyota grins despite herself, shaking her head at her roommate who is looking back at her with her chin propped on one green hand.

“Thanks.”

“Is your entire summer ruined because the Commander’s too busy?”

“Yes.”

“Ruined all of next year, too?”

“Being a third year cadet will exist in the shadow of not having a published paper,” Nyota agrees, wrinkling her nose at her tomato. “All because I couldn’t convince Commander Spock to work with me.”

“I can’t believe you couldn’t convince him,” Gaila drawls. “A Vulcan who meant what they said the first time they said it. Astonishing. No, wait, fascinating.”

“Thanks for the support, Gaila. Really,” Nyota mutters, laying down her fork and grinding her thumb and forefinger into her eyes until she sees stars.

“You’re welcome,” Gaila says cheerfully. “And you know what? Life goes on, an old Terran saying, as you very well know. So Doctor Carrick had to move, which is too bad, and you don’t get to do one single project while you’re at the Academy. It’ll be ok.”

Nyota sighs again and goes back to rubbing at her eyes. 

“It’s just… it’s huge, you know? If I can get it published, then I’ll have that and my grades, and -“

“-There’s something as important as your grades? Because really-“

“-It would make my resume really stand out and could get me a posting right away. Even maybe the Enterprise, if I can keep my grades high enough. Can you imagine? I’m sure they’re only going to take a handful of cadets and if I have the research background to be really strong in understanding sociolinguistics, I could have a real shot at being on that ship for her maiden voyage.”

“This won’t make or break your career, Ny. It’s ok to relax once in a while,” Gaila says gently.

“Commander Spock wasn’t even interested in hearing about my topic.”

“Commander Spock.”

“Yeah and you know what he’s like, today he was so-“

The flare of pain from Gaila’s boot against her shin is nothing compared to the horror of if she had finished that sentence the way she wanted to.

“Sir,” she says, looking up at where he’s appeared next to their table.

“Please point to the relevant passage.”

“Um,” she says, looking blankly at the padd he’s dropped next to her plate. “Sorry, what?”

“The word you referenced in my office regarding the mistranslation of the universal translator.”

“Oh. Right.”

It takes her a moment to find the section she’s looking for, which the Commander spends just standing there and Gaila spends in abnormal silence, staring up at him.

“That is not the word she was speaking.”

“Not it’s not,” Nyota agrees, fishing her stylus out of her bag and using it to highlight a section of text so that she can keep her hand away from any chance of brushing against his as he scrolls through the page she points to. “But this is about their hive mind and the ways their language has come to depend on their psionic biology.”

“That is not relevant.”

Nyota bites back her response that if it wasn’t relevant she wouldn’t have brought it up. 

“Actually, sir, if you read anything about their culture, they historically refuse to work with non-telepathic species and even then, they struggle with individuals who aren’t in a relationship.” She pauses, not exactly wanting to get into the minutia of the Commander’s personal life, but then again the Ambassador basically pointed out that neither she, nor him, nor Captain Pike were seeing anyone. “According to one article I read about them, they’re notoriously difficult to work with outside of the societal parameters they deem acceptable.”

“And by difficult you mean time consuming?” Gaila guesses and Nyota frowns at her, wishing she hadn’t shared anything from her visit to Spock’s office.

Spock just glances at Gaila and says, “That is accurate.”

“That’s too bad, sir. Nothing like having a project just not come to fruition.” The Commander looks like he’s actually trying to determine if there is in fact anything like that when Gaila continues. “So how did we even sign the treaty anyway?”

“The logical deduction is that whoever was in the diplomatic envoy was in a committed romantic relationship.”

“Well, isn’t that convenient.” Gaila taps a finger on the padd and looks over at Nyota with a gleam in her eye that she recognizes all too well as her roommate’s rampant, zealous excitement about something. “Hey, Ny, how’d you know all that? I mean, I know you read dictionaries for fun, but isn’t that something, Commander? That Cadet Uhura here figured all that out?”

“A well reasoned conclusion,” he allows and Gaila grins.

“Good thing Starfleet has her big brain,” Gaila says. “Otherwise we’d never know that working with the Saiph envoy would be like a million times easier if you were dating someone, Commander.”

“That is not mathematically correct.”

“Ah, well, it’s summer, sir. Can’t be blamed for not being on par with Uhura.”

Commander Spock looks like it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he would blame her for something like that but instead of saying anything, he just picks up the padd, tucks it under his arm and turns on his heel.

“I like him,” Gaila grins, watching his tall form cutting between the half-empty tables in the mess hall.

“I’m pretty sure he just told you that you can’t count very well.”

Gaila shrugs and Nyota’s troubled to see that the manic gleam hasn’t quite dissipated from her eyes or her smile.

“So.”

“So?”

“So.” Gaila pats the table with her hands, practically bouncing. “It’s obvious.”

“What is?”

“It’s logical. It is so incredibly logical. He’s not going to even be able to turn you down because of all the logic.”

“Gaila…”

“Commander Spock is, what, the smartest professor on campus?”

“Pretty much.”

“Unmatched academic background, recently returned from a deployment with Captain Pike, recently promoted to first officer of the Enterprise? He, even more than Doctor Carrick, would be the best advisor for your project and also a great professional connection to make?”

“Yes. So?”

“So,” Gaila grins. “He needs bunch of dilithium crystals? That’s what the Saiphs have, right? The whole point of Starfleet getting involved with them? They have all those dilithium deposits and their refinery technology is far more advanced than ours?”

“I guess so.”

“And the Saiphs won’t work with him because he’s not dating anyone?”

“Yeah, you heard him, it sounds like it’s going to take him forever to make progress with them and is going to spend all summer- Oh. Oh, Gaila, no.”

“This is going to be great.”

“I’m not… you can’t be serious.”

“I have never been so serious in my entire life,” Gaila says in a low, solemn voice that is completely ruined by the way her eyes are shining.

“I am not, I repeat, not, going to pretend to date Commander Spock so that he can get his dilithium crystals and I can get help on my paper.”

“The best part is that you are so obsessed with this project that you totally are.”

“He won’t even- this isn’t… this is insane, Gaila.”

“I cannot wait for this to happen. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been this excited,” Gaila grins, practically squirming in her seat and her hands fluttering over the table.

“Well, enjoy the thought of it as a hypothetical, never going to come to fruition, completely theoretical scheme you cooked up.”

“Published journal article,” Gaila squeals. “Meeting all of the senior officers of the Enterprise.”

“They’ll think I’m, oh my God, Gaila, they’ll think I’m sleeping with the guy to get a position on the ship! Commander Spock of all people!”

“Oh, please, it’s the 2250s. Nobody thinks that anymore, or I would never have approached Captain-“

“Gaila!”

“Mmm, she was good. And look, Ny, it’s a perfect opportunity to show off that big old brain of yours and impress the Commander with all your skills.”

Nyota drags her hand across her face, slowly shaking her head.

“Gaila, I love you very much, and you are a wonderful roommate except for all the ways in which you’re not, but just… just let this go. I am never, ever going to walk into Commander Spock’s office and suggest that we pretend to date for an entire summer. Even the thought of it, I just…” Nyota shudders and shakes her head again with a grimace. “Not happening.”

“Ok,” Gaila said, still grinning.

“Stop smiling. I’ll come up with another plan.”

“Sure you will.”

“Stop it, seriously. I’ll forget about the project, I’ll work on the Farragut for the rest of my career coding universal translators and updating dictionaries.”

“Uh huh.”

“I have professional mores, Gaila. Standards of conduct that this… just, no. No.”

“Mmhmm.”

“I mean, he’s not… I couldn’t even spend that much time with him, nor would I want to. He’s so… he’s just really… ”

“If you say anything about him that suggests you are holding him to inappropriate interspecies cultural relativism standards, such as that his Vulcan demeanor comes across as rude, or that the fact that he’s Vulcan is what’s holding you back, so help me Nyota, I will bring back that guy with all the tentacles and do it in your bed.”

“Do you look this stuff up in my textbooks? And I was not going to say that,” Nyota says primly. “And, also, the tentacles left slime all over our room, which you barely cleaned up.”

“I did too!”

Nyota goes back to her salad and ignores the grins Gaila shoots her, but at least Gaila shuts up about her idea and starts talking about the benefits of multiple appendages during sex which, while not Nyota’s favorite topic does detour the conversation from Gaila’s plan which Nyota is just not going to give a second thought to. At all. Ever.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, the response to this has made me all warm and fuzzy inside. I’m so happy that you’re all as excited about reading this as I was when I was writing it. It’s obviously not a very S/U-ish trope, since they are very serious professionals who would never engage in a fake relationship (bwahahah) and that made it even more fun to try to figure out. So enjoy the long, winding path that these dorks took this story on (emphasis on long, and a second emphasis on winding) and keep letting me know if you like it! Reviews are like watching Spock, in his adorkably attractive puffy jacket, say ‘precisely the opposite’ as Nyota smiles.

She hopes Commander Spock’s closed office door is a sign he’s not there because there is no way she’s doing this in the first place and not being able to find him will only help ensure that.

So she doesn’t knock and doesn’t take a step forward to activate the proximity sensor, and is therefore just standing in the hallway when even, measured footsteps turn the corner and echo down the corridor towards her.

“Cadet Uhura?” the Commander asks as he approaches her. He has a mug of tea in his hand and a padd tucked under his arm and looks so crisp and professional in his pressed uniform that she feels herself flush at the thought of what brings her there. 

“I was hoping to speak with you,” she leads with, since it’s innocuous enough and he might as well hear her out before he calls Starfleet medical for a full psychological work up on her. Which, frankly, might be warranted.

“I expect this is not another inquiry into my availability to serve as your advisor,” he says as he opens his door.

She waits until he’s set down his mug and his padd on his desk, hoping that if he gets settled in enough, he won’t bolt as soon as she starts talking.

“Actually it is, sir, but please let me explain.”

He does, and she doesn’t know if the complete blankness of his expression is better or worse than a raised eyebrow, or even him immediately showing her to the door.

“I’m one of the top cadets in my year, I excelled in your class, and I have a promising future in Starfleet. Frankly, sir, not only is it logical to contribute to the strength of the organization by cultivating talent, but you’d be lucky to work with me,” she finishes. She’s reaching, she thinks. Or maybe not, since a human might be turned off by a list of qualifications but Vulcans are so different when it comes to these things. “What I’m proposing would of course be strictly professional and give us the time to work on my paper simply in more public, social settings. It would be mutually beneficial, allowing me to complete my project, while also increasing the efficiency of your negotiations with the Saiph envoy.”

In the silence that follows, she waits with her hands folded in her lap and her heart pounding.

He is so incredibly still that she seriously considers asking if he heard her when he finally speaks.

“I assume this is not a form of Terran humor I am unfamiliar with,” he says, his tone so dry she almost assumes he’s joking himself.

All her tension leaves her in a breathy laugh, which she immediately staunches since she’s not sure if he would understand she’s not laughing at him.

“No, sir, it’s not. I understand that it sounds ludicrous and believe me, I also think it’s a bit crazy, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

That last part is untrue since it certainly can hurt to have him think she’s insane. He is the first officer of the Enterprise, and is one of the most distinguished professors in her department, and is not the kind of officer she wants thinking she’s deranged, but the thought of getting an advisor’s signature on her research proposal keeps her firmly in her chair and meeting his gaze as steadily as she can, no matter how flushed her cheeks feel.

She waits for him to speak, imagining him asking her to never bring this up again, imagining an official reprimand, imagining a silence that culminates in a stern dismissal and her showing herself out and never, ever being able to look at him again. It’ll make a good story, she thinks as she meets his flinty gaze, something to tell at a bar in a couple years after she’s worked her way back up from janitorial detail, ordered by one scandalized Commander Spock. Or, maybe a story she’ll tell from her posting on the Outer Rim, where she’ll transfer to immediately and hope the Enterprise never does a milk run to. She’ll live out the rest of her career as the officer who never made it above Ensign after propositioning a Vulcan for a fake relationship.

She’s in the middle of planning an elaborate, intricate revenge for Gaila when he finally speaks, and it’s so sudden, and his words so unexpected that she considers asking if he’ll repeat himself before deciding she just wants this conversation to end as soon as possible.

“I will consider it.”

“Excellent. Thank you,” she says and makes herself resist the urge to bolt long enough to leave him with the newest draft of her research outline. She steps out of his office before he can come to his senses, the door closing behind her and only then does she take a shaky breath.

Her heart pounds all the way down the hall, down six flights of stairs since she’s too jumpy to stand in a turbolift, and down the steps to the quad, which she walks briskly across, trying to get the excess energy out of her body.

She finds Gaila stretched out on her back in a sunny patch of grass outside of the computer sciences building and sits cross legged next to her, burying her face in her hands.

“He didn’t kick me out, or call Starfleet security to have me arrested, or say no immediately, so I think it went pretty well.” She presses her fingers into her forehead and squeezes her eyes shut behind her palms. “I can’t believe I did that!”

“Of course he didn’t,” Gaila says. “He probably wants to get into your-“

“-Don’t say it-“

“-Brain. He’s a touch-telepath. Literally into your brain.”

“He does not. He wants his dilithium crystals and I want a research advisor.”

“I can’t believe you went for it either, Ny,” Gaila says and when Nyota looks over, she’s grinning. “You’re nuts. Off the wall. Nuts. Wall. Walnuts? Is that why they’re called that?”

“No.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure that I’m never, ever going to be able to look Commander Spock in the eye again.”

“You’re fine. You’re braver than I thought. And kind of unhealthily obsessed with this paper if you actually took my suggestion. Nyota Uhura, asking a Vulcan out on a date.”

“I didn’t ask him on a date,” Nyota corrects. “There will be zero dates. I asked him if he wanted to review my progress on my project in a public setting.”

“Semantics. Oh, you guys can talk about semantics! I bet you’ll both love that.”

“This was a horrible idea. I blame you, you know. I probably broke more than a dozen cultural taboos, horribly offended him-“

“-Got him thinking about spending time with that hot cadet who was in his class-“

“-Suggested he do something so incredibly ridiculous-“

“-Gave him a chance to get to know the woman half of Starfleet, hell, half of the Federation, wants to date-“

“-And potentially compromise the professional integrity of-“

“-Set up a situation where he has you all to yourself-“

“-God, Gaila, is it going to be like this with you all summer?”

“Only if he says yes. Oh, I hope he does!” Gaila squeals, excitedly drumming her heels on the ground. “He’s cute, too, you lucky thing.”

“Even if he does agree, and he won’t since he’s not crazy like you are, an arrangement like this is really going to cut into my productivity, which is a whole other reason I never should have asked him to do this with me,” Nyota sighs, pulling out her padd and calling up her notes. “What with meeting up with him and we’ll probably have to actually eat, and traveling to and from whatever we decide to do. I wonder if we can just get some witnesses to come meet us in the library.”

“I mean, I’ve seen him at the gym a few times, and Vulcan martial arts, Ny? Yum.”

“Or maybe he’d be ok with just meeting for coffee, then we can skip meals.”

“He was wearing this gray t-shirt, you know, the departmental ones we all get? S'Fraelae told me the science department ones were replicated wrong and are too tight and I never really thought about it, but Ny-“

“I think we could work in the student union, too, that’s pretty public and the net access is as fast as it is in the library. And Vulcans don’t sleep a lot, which is good, so I won’t be worried about keeping him up late if I have to meet with him after dinner.”

“He was in the weight room with Captain Pike one day, and let me tell you-“

“Do you want to have sex with him?” Nyota asks, flicking her padd off and pinning her roommate with a stare. Gaila, for her part, pauses mid-sentence with her mouth hanging open, before she shuts it with an audible click.

“Pike? Sure. Would bang, definitely.”

“No, the Commander. I just need to know ahead of time. If this actually works out – which is totally insane to think it would –are you going to be taking up any part of his day?”

“I- What? No, no, no. Vulcans and Orions are biologically incompatible. It’d be terrible. He can’t use his telepathy with me, I can’t use my pheromones with him. It’d be, oh it’d be awful. Like two humans having sex, complete sensory blindness.” Gaila shudders. “Still, an officer like the Commander. That uniform? Who can help but look?”

“I need his answer by the end of this week,” Nyota murmurs to herself. “I don’t think I told him that and I should have, because this morning I found out that there’s still an opening to work on neurolinguistic research with Lieutenant Commander Hyden. I could apply for it if this falls through, even though that’s not really ideal.”

“You can,” Gaila mutters.

“I can what? Apply for that position?”

“Never mind,” Gaila sighs.

…

In the next few days, she sees Commander Spock twice, both times the Saiph Ambassador gliding beside him, her robes flowing around her, and her head shaking in a gesture she must have picked up since coming to Earth.

The first time, he glances over at her and she busies herself with her padd, all the while telling herself that she’s a Starfleet cadet who will soon be an officer and if she can’t manage to actually make eye contact with him, she may want to rethink a career choice that lists ‘bravery’ and ‘perseverance in the face of obstacles’ among its chief qualifications. Still, he doesn’t approach her either and some part of her hopes they can just both ignore any conversations that may or may not have taken place in his office and may or may not have covered the topic of a fake relationship. 

A bigger part of her wants to graduate with Lieutenant stripes and a top posting, so the second time she sees him, she pushes back the temptation to run for the hills, sets her jaw, and gives him a polite nod when he and the Ambassador walk past her.

The third time she sees him and the Ambassador, it’s in the mess hall and Nyota is interrupted in her perusal of which protein bar to take back with her to the library.

“Cadet?” she hears from behind her, and she turns to find Captain Pike.

“Uhura,” she supplies.

“Cadet Uhura, you speak Saiph, correct?”

“Saphian,” she corrects before she can stop herself. “Yes, sir, some.”

“Translate for the Ambassador,” he orders and she nods, dropping the bar she had picked up and following the captain over to where the Ambassador is standing with Commander Spock.

Her heart starts banging around in her chest when the Commander looks at her and she feels her palms begin to sweat, but with the Captain and Ambassador staring at her there’s really no time to think about the pervasive awkwardness or how badly she wishes she had never listened to Gaila. So instead of letting the embarrassment of the memory of her conversation with the Commander overwhelm her, she firmly pushes that aside, takes a deep breath and focuses on what the Amabassador is saying.

It takes her a while to understand the problem since the Ambassador is speaking quickly and isn’t interested in slowing down so that Nyota can understand her. She wonders, belatedly, where her attendants are, or some of her other colleagues that she’s seen around the Academy in the last few days, but none of them are here in the mess hall to supply an extra, properly encoded universal translator since the Ambassador’s seems to be broken.

“She- well, I think the issue is that Saiphs are carnivores,” Nyota explains to the Captain and Commander. “She doesn’t seem to have a word for vegetables, dairy, or grains, and she keeps asking for food, so…”

She trails off, since it’s completely possible that she’s misread the situation. Gaila eats a diet of algae and desserts that alternatively makes Nyota’s stomach turn and mouth water, and Ghelfians photosynthesize for their nutritional needs, and Sanghvis don’t eat at all, but Nyota’s pretty sure she’s on the right track. She gestures towards the display of Andorian food and when the Ambassador’s sharp, dark eyes track her movements towards the array of steaks and kebobs, she offers to take her there.

“Uncooked,” she says, since she can’t remember the word for ‘raw.’ 

The Ambassador nods and points to a particularly bloody piece of meat and Nyota tries not to grimace, or take it personally, when she seems to be expected to serve it to her.

“Knife? Fork? And would you perhaps like to sit?” she asks but the Ambassador gives her a blank stare, takes the plate from her without a word, and remains where she is as she begins ripping off large chunks of meat with surprising strength.

“Translators on the fritz,” Pike sighs, appearing behind Nyota with the Commander and she turns to look at them, rather than the source of wet, smacking sounds as the Ambassador has her lunch.

“I can go get you another one from the linguistics building, sir.”

“They are being recalibrated. A summer project by the acoustical engineering department,” Commander Spock says.

She looks up at him and then quickly away, feeling her cheeks warm and wishes for some of his Vulcan stoicism and emotional control. He, at least, seems unperturbed by their earlier conversation and she focuses on trying to emulate his calm.

“Well,” Pike says, his eyes trained on the Ambassador before he swallows and glances away. “Guess our plan to bring her to a more crowded place in order to prove we aren’t completely socially isolated backfired. Not all of us eat rabbit food, Mr. Spock.”

“On the contrary, Captain, my diet-“

“Rabbit food,” Pike says again and to Nyota’s surprise, smacks the Commander on the shoulder. There’s a list of species you just don’t touch and Vulcans are at the top of it, but the Commander doesn’t even react to the gesture. “Eat up. I need those dilithium crystals. You need them, too, if we’re ever going to take our girl out for a spin.”

Pike is gone in a quick staccato of boot falls, leaving her alone with the Commander, who is carefully not watching the Ambassador eat.

“I do not understand the predilection for assigning a female gender to a starship,” he says quietly and she glances up at him, surprised he’s spoken to her, and in such a soft tone at that.

Tell him to forget the whole thing, she tells herself.

Tell him you need his answer, she thinks wildly.

“Cadet?” he asks and she nearly jumps, realizing she’s just been staring at him.

He’s a Commander, has one of the most renowned records of an Academy graduate, and apparently is buddies, of sorts, with Captain Pike. He’s intimidating on the best of days and downright terrifying on others, and her mind is full of his reaction when cadets clearly hadn’t done their homework, or a particularly low scoring quiz he had given them, so she just wants to slink away into a dark corner of the Academy somewhere where she never has to see him again.

But instead of excusing herself and crawling under a rock, or explaining to him that her insane Orion roommate planted this idea of them pretending to date in her head and she’s already considering homicide as a suitable course of action, she hears herself say, “Well, all the old sailors on Earth were single men, sir. I’d say, considering the circumstances, it’s actually quite fitting.”

She looks away, mortified, but can’t bring herself to continue to watch the way the Ambassador is eating, so she ends up looking back at him, her cheeks burning and catches the tiny twitch of his eyebrow.

“Apparently.”

“I’m going to…” she points to the exit of the mess hall before forcing herself to calm down. “If you don’t need further assistance, Commander, I am otherwise currently occupied.”

He just nods and she leaves him with the Ambassador licking at her fingers and staring back and forth between them.

…

“I wonder why he’s single,” Gaila muses, squeezing her curls in a towel. “Don’t Vulcans mate for life?”

“Yes, as young children, I always thought. And actually, they have all these really interesting etymologies in their languages surrounding that, since it’s so rare for them to date as adults. The word for-“

“Think she died?”

“What? His bondmate? No. Maybe. I don’t know.” Nyota pauses and looks up, only to get an eyeful of naked Orion. She just shakes her head, too used to Gaila at this point to care much.

“That’d be sad if she’s dead,” Gaila says, stepping into her underwear. “And then to have that thrown in his face by the Ambassador. And you with your whole ‘guess everyone in this room is single’ thing you have going on. Dating. Ugh.”

“It would be sad,” Nyota agrees, dropping her gaze back to her padd while Gaila flits around the room in just her panties. “Maybe they just broke up, although, I don’t know. Vulcan doesn’t really have a word for-“

“Who do you think he’s had sex with?”

“What? What?”

“If he’s single. Wait, are Vulcans even attracted to any other species other than their own?”

“I don’t want to even think about it, Gaila. That’s his business.”

“I wonder if he was single when he was a cadet,” Gaila muses, sitting down to pull socks on. “Most cadets are so much fun, you know, showing up at the Academy having hardly tried sex with other species. It’s like everyone gets four years to spread oatmeal-“

“-Um-“

“-And try everyone else out.” Gaila wrinkles her nose and frowns at Nyota, who just glowers back, knowing what’s coming. “Except you.”

“I do fine, thank you for your concern.”

“I am concerned,” Gaila says, shaking her bra at Nyota before pulling it on. “Very concerned. It’s not good for you to go for so long-“

“Gaila…”

“Just saying,” Gaila shrugs. “Don’t spend all summer with Commander Hot, sorry, Spock, and come crying to me if you don’t get laid until you’re the Rear Admiral of Starfleet Intelligence.”

Nyota grins. “You think I’ll really make Rear Admiral?”

“Yes, and then you’ll immediately drop dead of stress, or be committed from having a nervous breakdown due to never relaxing. Terrible career planning, Ny.”

“I don’t know why I bother with you,” Nyota mutters, and then groans when Gaila, still nearly naked, nearly jumps on top of her to hug her so tight she can barely breathe.

“You need me.”

“I need you to get off of me.”

“Vice Admiral Nyota ‘I’m Sexually Stimulated By A Long Afternoon of Research’ Uhura.”

“You are ridiculous.”

“Fleet Admiral Nyota ‘I Do My Research In Bed And It’s Long And Hard’ Uhura.”

“I can’t breathe. You realize this, right?”

“Federation President Nyota ‘I Fantasize About Recently Published Academic Journal Articles’ Uhura.”

Nyota sighs under Gaila weight. “Are you done?”

“Just getting started. The only thing that can stop me is a cocktail. With you.”

Nyota sighs again and glances at her padds on her desk even as Gaila squeezes her tighter. “One, and then I’m going back to the library.”

Gaila squeals and jumps up.

“Progress!”

…

The next time she sees him, the Ambassador is pacing in front of Cochrane Hall and the Commander is just watching her from a distance, his hands clasped behind his back.

She considers turning and walking the other way, but by the time she’s decided to he’s glanced over at her and she can’t very well pretend she wasn’t about to walk down the path he’s standing on now that he’s seen her.

“Sir,” she says as she approaches him. She wants to keep walking, wanting to leave him alone until she hears back from him since it’s all too weird for her, but instead of a polite nod and telling him to have a good afternoon, she finds herself stopping next to him and voicing the concerns she had earlier that Gaila had so completely ignored. “I didn’t say this before, and I should have, but I just hope you didn’t find my suggestion inappropriate, nor that you should be reticent at all to turn me down.”

His eyebrow quirks slightly, easing his normally stern expression. “I believe that is what the higher ranking officer is supposed to say under such circumstances, Cadet.”

“I well… yes.” She had looked up fraternization regulations sometime between telling Gaila she was completely nuts and finding herself actually considering her suggestion, and it is true that superior officers are supposed to mitigate any occurrences of favoritism, and certainly avoid coercion, but beyond that she found that Starfleet is permissive of personal relationships. “Still,” she tells him with a small shrug. “I’m sure the suggestion was sudden and likely unexpected.”

“Do not trouble yourself.”

“Ok, good, as long as I didn’t cause any offense.”

They watch the Ambassador pace for a long moment and she’s about to say goodbye, a certain weight lifted from her now that they’ve spoken again and he’s as unflappable about this as anything else, when he speaks.

“I admit I am uncomfortable with a scenario that is so firmly rooted in deceit.”

She looks up at him, her mind whirring through everything she knows about Vulcan culture before kicking herself for not thinking of that sooner. “Of course. I hadn’t really thought about that, and it’s an uncomfortable situation to begin with. But I wouldn’t want either of us to lie.”

“I am uncertain as to how this arrangement would preclude that.”

“Well…” She drags her teeth over her lower lip, considering. “If you think about it, I asked you in your office the other day if you wanted to spend time with me socially.”

His eyes narrow slightly as he looks at her. “Time spent with you in public working on your paper.”

She smiles despite herself. “That is just about how I spend all my time, Commander. Trust me, it’s ruined a number of actual relationships, and I can assure you that it is in no way uncharacteristic for me to spend the majority of my day on school work.” She holds open her bag to show him a half dozen padds she just checked out of the library. “See? Proof.”

“You are continuing your research without a confirmed advisor?” he asks and she doesn’t think she’s imagining the note of incredulity that colors his voice.

“I’m interested in the topic,” she shrugs. “And I’m going to receive a top posting upon graduation, hopefully on the Enterprise, and I have two years left at the Academy to secure that.”

“If you are so adamant on a competitive posting-“

“No,” she interrupts before realizing she just spoke over a commission officer. “Sorry, sorry, sir. But I’m not, I- I work for what I earn, sir.”

His slightly open mouth and the crease between his brows suggests he doesn’t quite follow her outburst, but then his expression smooths and he looks at her with those dark, searching eyes and she presses her lips together, rocking back on her heels slightly.

“I did not intend to presume…” he starts and then doesn’t seem to quite know how to finish. He pauses for a long moment and she waits, her fingers tight on the strap of her bag, before he finally says, “Favoritism is illogical.”

“I know.”

“Indeed.”

“That’s not why… that’s really, really not why I suggested this,” she says quickly, taking a step towards him before she can stop himself. “Frankly if you were human, I wouldn’t have even- Consider your heritage a certain advantage in this case.”

He’s quiet again, just watching her as the Ambassador paces, occasionally pausing to look at them before she resumes walking back and forth, her robes flapping in the wind.

“It is not an advantage if I refuse to partake in this arrangement,” he says shortly.

“I won’t ask you to lie, not if you don’t show me any favoritism,” she promises. “Rather, just… let everyone decide their own truth.”

“Lying through omission is still lying.”

She shrugs, trying to brush off his brusque tone and looks over at the Ambassador, thankful Saiph’s don’t have good hearing.

“Look, it’s just as true that I enjoyed your class, found your office hours intriguing and our conversation stimulating, and hoped to have further similarly interesting conversations in the future, outside of a strictly professional setting. If I tell anyone the that, they’ll think I asked you out. Which I have now, twice technically.” She lets herself grin. “And I can honestly tell them that you’re a tough catch sir, and they won’t even know I’m talking about as a research advisor.”

He does that thing again where he just watches her for a long moment and she tries not to shift under his gaze. He finally glances over at the Ambassador, who has sat down on a bench and is staring right back at him.

“I will continue to consider your suggestion,” the Commander finally says.

“Good luck with her in the meantime,” she replies and she thinks he pauses for a moment before he walks back over to his companion.

…

“Wow, she hates him,” Gaila says, her chin propped on her hand, and her elbow on the table they’re sitting at outside of the mess hall. Nyota glances up long enough to watch the Ambassador striding across the quad with Commander Spock by her side, the Commander saying something and the Ambassador studiously ignoring him. “Why are they making him work with her again? Can’t they find someone else that she would actually talk to?”

“The Enterprise needs those special dilithium crystals, or something.” Nyota shrugs and scrolls to the next page of the journal article she’s reading. “Don’t you know all about this? Engines and stuff?”

“Yeah, the active multiphasic dissipation engine design they’re installing on the Enterprise,” Gaila says dreamily. “It’s brand new warp technology they chose so that the ship’s range is farther than any other in the fleet. I read all about it. I mean, not like you read with your nose stuck in a padd for hours at a time. I read it and then moved on with my life. To see friends, to go for a walk, to watch a holovid. Absorbed knowledge then had fun. You should try it.”

“Hmmm.”

“But I want to know why him, why not, who is it, Chief Engineer Olson? Pike could assign him to this and the Commander could be less stoically, logically frustrated all summer. Oooh, and then you could pretend to date Olson! He’s cute, too.”

“I don’t know,” Nyota murmurs, highlighting a paragraph and making a note to cross reference it with an article she had read that morning. “But I’m guessing it’s part of his job as first officer, getting all these various things coordinated for the ship. Anyway, Pike specifically told him to. And, I would never pretend to date Olson. At least the Commander is a professional. Olson’s like an overgrown puppy.”

“I can’t wait for the Commander to say yes to you.”

“I’m not sure he will,” Nyota sighs, glancing up at him and the Ambassador again. “He’s pretty uncomfortable with the idea. I am too, you know, I should never have let you talk me into this.”

“Talk you into something? Me? If I had that power, we’d be at the beach with fruity drinks with those little rain shields in them.”

“Umbrellas.”

“Sure, whatever.” Gaila sighs heavily, her focus still on Commander Spock and the Ambassador. “I still can’t believe you asked him.”

“You suggested it, and I still think I’m insane for having listened to you. You’re rubbing   
off on me after so many semesters rooming together.”

“I bet he wants to rub off on-“

“Gaila!”

“What? Men are all ‘when’s your roommate coming out, Gaila?’ ‘how’s Uhura, Gaila, is she here tonight?’ ‘can I get Uhura’s number, Gaila? I have a question about dimorphic phonologies.’ It’s ridiculous, Ny!”

“Well maybe they have questions!”

“Questions about getting in your pants.”

“He’s… he’s not… he was my professor, Gaila! And would be my advisor. It wouldn’t even be like that.”

“You could use some rubbing-“

“Oh stop. Please.”

Gaila nods slowly, her lips pursed as she continues to watch Commander Spock.

“He’s hot. Those ears, I could just-”

“Look, I wouldn’t ever suggest this whole… thing with him if I thought there was an actual realistic scenario that he and I would ever… that we would... It’s just… No. Not him, not me, not the two of us. Let’s focus on my paper, Gaila. Stop with any other ideas, please, it’s weird enough to even think about spending time with the guy outside of his office or classroom.”

“Ok, you think about your paper, I’ll think about-.”

“I hate you,” Nyota sighs.

“I thought you loved me.”

“I do. It’s confusing, trust me.”

“Humans,” Gaila mutters.

…

She has her application for Hyden half filled out when her comm rings.

“Uhura,” she says, flipping it open.

“I accept your proposal, Cadet Uhura.”

“What?”

“This is Commander Spock.”

“I- yes. Of course. You, um, accept?”

“Yes.”

His statement is followed by a long, empty silence and she desperately casts about for what to say.

“Great,” she finally gets out.

“How, exactly, do you propose we begin?” he asks in that brisk, succinct tone she’s heard dozens of times in his classroom and she realizes she doesn’t actually know. She looks over at Gaila’s traitorously empty side of the room, then back at her comm.

“I need to show you my research proposal,” she starts, because that’s simple enough. “What I had earlier was a preliminary draft and I’ve expanded it since then.”

“Please send it to me at your earliest convenience.”

“Of course.”

She pauses, still studying the black and gold casing of her comm, so innocuous a moment ago and now it’s bringing her Commander Spock’s voice. And she has to… go out with him. In public. For real. For fake, for real, which makes her head swim.

“Well, let’s start with a cup of tea and go from there,” she suggests because the idea of actually doing this seems a bit daunting now that it’s not theoretical. But her padd with her notes for her paper is in her bag and she focuses on that, not on the idea of being in social situation with Commander Spock of all people. For the entire summer.

“Very well,” he says and as soon as they’ve made arrangements, he hangs up without saying goodbye, which leaves her sitting on her bunk, staring down at her comm and wondering exactly what she just got herself into.

And, she thinks grimly, looking over at her closet, what exactly to wear on a fake, first date with a Vulcan.


	3. Chapter 3

She supposes that she should have known he would wear his uniform. Not that she exactly got dressed up, but there’s pretending to have a relationship and then there’s not even trying, and she at least put on a nice skirt for their date.

Ostensible date, she reminds herself, not that it’s hard to forget that with the completely bland expression he has as he approaches or the weight of her padds of research to review with him in her bag.

Still, she has to push down the way her stomach flutters with the nerves she’s carried all day, hoping this entire thing wasn’t a completely terrible idea. 

“Cadet,” he says with a polite nod. 

“Sir.” She hitches her bag up on her shoulder and swallows. The quiet café she chose suddenly seems formidable and her mouth is dry and she can’t really think of what to say to him now that he’s standing there in front of her. “Are you-“

“I had thought-“

They both pause and she studies the science insignia on his uniform before deciding she doesn’t really want to be staring at his chest, so she nods her chin towards the door.

“So let’s…” 

She realizes, after she’s stepped past him into the café and left as much room between their bodies as possible, that she in no way is prepared for this. The menu seems daunting, no matter that she and Gaila have been there a half dozen times, and most of the tables are full. The only empty ones are tucked into quiet corners that seem way too dim and intimate and she thinks wildly that a cup of tea is in no way an innocuous way to start off this arrangement.

“You got my outline,” she says for something to break the silence as they wait in line.

“I did.”

She waits for him to make some sort of comment on it, but he just studies the pastry case. He only glances over at her when her comm buzzes and she reaches into her bag to turn it off, ignoring the incessant texts from Gaila.

“One of my friends,” she explains.

“Ah.”

She brushes her hair back over her shoulder for something to do with her hands.

“I actually was going to tell you that she kind of knows about… all this. I haven’t told anyone else, nor do I plan to, but …” Nyota trails off. As much as she wants to pin the blame for this horrendously awkward non-date on Gaila, it’s hardly fair. “Anyway, I just thought you should know that she, at least, knows.”

He nods and they lapse back into silence. Nyota watches the customers in front of them in line dwindle one by one, each stepping away with a steaming coffee or tea or plate of pastry in a way that makes her feel like they’re each abandoning her in turn, as if they would just stay in line, she could continue to put off any more interaction with the Commander.

All too soon the last customer in front of her gets his credit chip back, pockets it, and moves away, leaving her with the barista and no idea what she wants because she’s been too busy thinking about how incredibly uneasy she feels standing there next to her former Advanced Morphology professor, on a date that is not a date.

“Uh,” she stalls, looking up at the projection of an antique chalkboard. “Chai?”

“Real milk or replicated?”

“Replicated,” she answers since it’s cheaper. She digs into her bag for her wallet, which is of course buried beneath her a sweater, her padds of research, and a filmplast she grabbed from the gym with the summer schedule on it.

In the time it takes her to pull it out, Spock has placed his own order.

“Together?” the barista asks, his voice bright as he smiles at them.

“No,” she says quickly.

She curls her hands around her cup and studiously watches the steam curl and twist while he pays for his own drink. She resists the urge to stare around the café to see if there’s anyone there that she knows. She’s not certain that if she did see a friend or acquaintance she wouldn’t just mumble an apology to the Commander and bolt out the door, drag Gaila to the bar despite the fact that it’s mid morning, and attempt to use Cardassian Sunrises to scrub the memory of ever having done this from her brain.

“So you read my proposal,” she starts once they’ve thankfully left the counter and chosen a table. Work, at least, is something she’s good at and can talk about with ease, no matter how weird it is to be sitting at a tiny table with him stiff and formal in the chair across from her.

She stirs her tea twice, and then a third time before makes herself put her spoon down. All around them at other tables people are happily holding conversations or deep in a book. The clatter and chatter of the café seems at stark odds with their own table, and the noise makes her head spin.

“Naturally.”

She waits for him to say something else and when he doesn’t and just looks at her evenly, she has to resist the urge to fidget.

“Do you have any feedback?” she finally asks into the silence that stretches between them.

“I sent you my comments.”

“Oh, I-“ she starts, struggling for a reply in the face of his cool, succinct response. “I haven’t checked my message queue since early this morning.”

“That is apparent.”

She presses her lips together and nods, trying to fight the heat racing to her cheeks. She hadn’t checked her messages because she’d been out running, trying to burn off excess nerves. Afterwards, she had taken a long shower with the sonics turned up so high they made her skin prick. She had stayed in there a long time so as to delay the inevitability of dressing and leaving her dorm to go meet him.

She wishes now that she had spent the time checking her email again or at least pursuing her notes once more, no matter how sure she had been that she hadn’t needed to.

She busies herself pulling out her padd and calling up her inbox and sure enough, there’s a message from him.

“Sorry, sir,” she says, making herself articulate the words even though she wants to mumble them. “I’ll just read this real quick.”

“I will wait.”

And wait he does, perfectly still and unmoving. She imagines that she can feel his gaze burning into the top of her head while she frantically scans the comments he’s sent her. It makes her brain fuzzy and jumpy so that she’s unable to focus on the words in front of her. Laughter from across the room doesn’t help, nor does the group that sits down at a table next to them, loudly and good naturedly arguing about the latest Parrises Squares match against Mars. Once, she looks up and he’s just watching her, and when she goes back to reading she has to take a breath and then another one to calm the frantic buzzing of her thoughts that’s preventing her from absorbing the words.

“Sorry,” she says again, finally, setting the padd down and hoping that she’s captured at least the general meaning of what he wrote. “I’ll check my messages right before we meet next time.”

“That would be wise,” he says, his fingers flicking over his own padd as he writes down a handful of citations. 

“Do you, uh, have anything about this you’d like to discuss now?”

“My schedule precludes an extended discussion,” he answers and she flushes again, wishing she had come having read his notes if he has so little time. “Please review these sources by our next meeting.”

There’s six of them and four of them are novel length texts. 

“Sure.” She pulls her upper lip between her teeth as she studies the list he made. “When would you like that to be, sir?”

“Is this amount of work a problem?”

“No, not at all,” she answers quickly, steeling herself for as many sleepless nights as she typically endures during the height of the semester. “Just trying to get an idea of how often we’ll be seeing each other.”

“What is typical in this arrangement?”

“I have no idea,” she says, fiddling with her stylus before she makes herself put it down and keep her hands as still as his are. “If we were actually seeing each other? Often.”

“’Often’ is not a specific answer.”

“Every day, every few days,” she amends. “However much you would want to see someone you enjoyed spending time with.” He just looks at her stonily, his expression as severe as ever and she winces. “Not an adequate answer?”

“No.”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out. 

“It’ll take me five days, maybe a week to finish this amount of reading,” she tells him. That’s pushing it, even if she does nothing else.

“You are not certain as to which?”

“I… no. I can’t just guess based on the titles and page numbers.”

He looks down at the citations and she swears he somehow frowns without his expression actually changing.

“I see.”

“I-I’ll do it in five days.”

“I will see you then,” he replies, already standing and gathering his padd. 

“Goodbye, sir, thank you for your time,” she says, calling up the first text as he leaves the café.

When she gets back to her dorm after several hours spent bent over her reading, Gaila throws their door open before Nyota can even raise her hand to the sensor to open it. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she breathes.

“You are beyond creepy.”

“How was it? Tell me everything. You wore that? I wish I was here this morning. What did he wear? Where’d you go? What’d you get? What’d you talk about?”

“My paper,” Nyota answers, letting her bag fall onto the foot of her bed and sitting to unzip her boots. “Other relevant sources that the Commander thought I should read. And by that I mean half of the Academy library.”

“Oh no,” Gaila groans. “All you did was talk about work? That is terrible.”

“It was pretty terrible. Really terrible, actually. And yes, of course that’s all we talked about. Or, rather, we talked about how I should have checked my messages the moment he sent me something, unbeknownst to me. And he was kind of … short.”

“But he’s so tall.”

“No, I mean abrupt. Almost rude? But he did give me this research on-“

“-Research? Come on, Nyota, you two-”

“-These dialects in Cardassian that really highlight the ways in which-“

“-But this was supposed to be-“

“-Societies with really strict social hierarchies-“ 

“-Exciting-“

“-End up with these words that are mirrored in the various dialects-“

“-Dramatic-“

“-And their meanings change as you consider how the words are used in these really different walks of life-“

“-Thrilling-“

“-Which really fits with what I’m writing about, except he gave me so much to read that-I-“

“-Salacious!”

“Salacious, Gaila? He’s Vulcan, please.”

“This is the most boring fake relationship I’ve ever heard about,” Gaila says grumpily, dropping onto her bed and crossing her arms. “This was supposed to be more fun for me.”

“Sorry,” Nyota says, shaking her head at the frown on her roommate’s face.

“You should be.”

When she’s finally done with the papers he assigned her, she meets the Commander for breakfast in the mess hall. When he gets there, he sets down a bowl of fruit and plomeek soup and pulls her padd towards him without greeting her.

“In the future it would be convenient if you sent me your notes ahead of our meetings.”

“Oh. Sure, sorry, sir.”

She pokes at her oatmeal and watches him while he scrolls through her padd.

“I assume you read Herschelii’s article?” he finally asks.

“Of course.”

“And you understood it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

“I am.”

“The author’s secondary thesis is not referenced in your notes,” he says, sliding the padd back towards her.

“It wasn’t particularly relevant.” His eyebrows rise and she feels her mouth tighten. She drops her hands to her lap and smooths her skirt, forcing herself to take a deep breath. “I didn’t spend the time taking notes on it as it only tangentially relates to my topic and it didn’t seem like an efficient use of time.”

“Perhaps your topic could be broadened.”

“Perhaps,” she makes herself agree. “I hadn’t considered it.”

“Do so. I will expect a revised outline from you as soon as possible,” he says, rising from the table with his half empty tray of food, balancing it on one hand while he pulls out his comm. He walks away, already making a call on it while she just stares after him.

“Um, bye,” she says to his retreating form, blinking at his back. “Sir.”

He doesn’t turn around to respond to the farewell and she watches him walk out of the mess hall with that quick, even gait of his before sighing, scrubbing a hand over her face, and turning back to her notes.

“It was fine,” she tells Gaila that night, when her roommate plies her for details. “If by fine I mean that I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m an idiot and that he also hasn’t absorbed any type of Terran manners while he’s been on Earth.”

“A Vulcan? Being abrupt?” Gaila covers her open mouth with her hand. “No.”

“Yeah, I just… well, whatever. I guess I didn’t sign up for social niceties when I suggested this whole thing.” She sets her bag down and pulls out her padd. “An advisor with different cultural norms than mine is better than no advisor, right?”

“Not better for me. You with no advisor would mean you at the-“

“Don’t say bar.”

“Bar.”

“You’re like a broken record, Gaila,” Nyota says, then shakes her head and sits down on her bed to explain what a broken record is.

…

To Gaila’s continued despondency, Nyota finds her non-relationship with Spock engenders nothing that remotely resembles salaciousness. Instead, it just means reading. Lots of reading. And when she’s not buried in reading, she’s having stilted conversations with him.

The fact that the Commander gets no easier to work with is something Nyota forces herself to put aside. She’s a communications track cadet and a damn good one at that, so she makes herself view negotiating his abruptness and severity as training for future situations where she’ll have to work with individuals who don’t observe the same social niceties as humans do.

Still, she can’t help but wonder whether she would have suggested this arrangement if she had known this side of him. In his office hours and the few times she had approached him after class, he hadn’t exactly been warm and welcoming but he hadn’t been quite as brusque, and even when they were negotiating their arrangement, he had been less curt. 

Or maybe he hadn’t. He had always been so quiet and withdrawn that maybe she just never spoke to him enough to notice his personality. And, now that she’s spent enough time with him to discover it, she’s not particularly impressed.

She knows on some level that Gaila’s right and that she shouldn’t be judging him according to how a human would approach a relationship, even a fake one, but it still nags at her and by their fourth meeting she’s already not looking forward to it, and by the sixth, she’s actively dreading it.

Still, she’s careful to check her inbox often, to send him copies of her thorough notes, and she even revises her entire outline to include Herschelii’s thesis, though nothing seems to help. He remains terse and off putting, so that they spend as much time sitting in silence as they do awkwardly trying to speak to each other and the hours she spends with him makes her want to grind her teeth in irritation.

“He is driving me nuts,” she admits to Gaila one evening over dinner.

“Well, he doesn’t know how terrifying you are when you get mad. Or how shrill you get.”

“I’m not mad, I’m just…”

“Mad?”

“No. He’s just not easy to be around and I kind of wish I hadn’t suggested any amount of personal time with him if this is what he’s like.”

“Maybe he’s uncomfortable.”

“Do Vulcans even get uncomfortable?”

“If they did, probably fake dating a former student would be the way to achieve that,” Gaila shrugs. “Or maybe he’s in love with you. Secretly. Oooh, yes. Salacious. Just like I was saying.”

“Stop. Please.”

“Maybe he’s just being really Vulcan.”

“Well good for him. No wonder they have a reputation as being hard to work with.”

“You’ve always liked a challenge,” Gaila reminds her.

“This paper was supposed to be the challenge,” Nyota says to her salad, poking at it listlessly. “Not dealing with my advisor.”

“I bet you can wear him down with your charm.”

“I’m pretty sure than Vulcans and charm are antonyms.”

“I bet he’s super charming underneath all the-“

“Rudeness, impertinence, and impatience with the limits of my human brain?”

“So he doesn’t have Terran manners,” Gaila shrugs. “Maybe he’s being super polite for a Vulcan.”

“Maybe,” Nyota sighs.

“Give him another chance. Give him like six more chances. Give him proportional chances for how hot he is.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Thanks,” Gaila grins. “That’s a huge compliment to an Orion. See? Interspecies competencies. I knew you were a high – or low, sometimes – playing card at the subject.”

“He could use a crash course in that topic,” Nyota says, stabbing at a carrot. 

As much as she wants to drop off a copy of the Academy’s ‘Guide to Understanding and Interacting with Other Cultures’ along with the copious notes on readings she prepares for him each time they meet, she doesn’t. Instead, she imagines submitting her paper to various academic journals, even as he yet again interrupts their conversation to take a call on his comm with no explanation or apology. She visualizes receiving the news that it’s been accepted for publication even when he once again doesn’t bother to bid her goodbye, just leaves when he’s decided their conversation is over. She imagines adding this independent project with him to her resume even as he raises an eyebrow over a tiny mistake she made in part of her notes, mistyping a phrase in Cardassian so that the verb conjugation is wrong.

“I overlooked that, sir,” she explains quickly. “Sorry.”

“Do not do so again.”

“It wasn’t intentional.” He looks less than convinced by the idea it might have been just an error and she tries to keep her jaw from clenching. “Humans occasionally make mistakes, as much as we endeavor not to.”

“Having worked with and taught a number of humans, I am well aware,” he says coolly.

She doesn’t quite know what to say to that, so just remains silent for the rest of the meeting except when he specifically asks her something.

It’s no better the next time she sees him, or the next. Despite her best efforts, he remains curt at best and bordering on rude at worst, so that when he sits down across from her without a greeting and without preamble begins speaking, she’s hardly surprised by the abruptness.

She is, though, surprised that he announces that the Saiph Ambassador does not believe they’re dating.

“How do you know that?” she asks quietly. Around them, the student union is thankfully empty, but Nyota still looks up to see if anyone might have heard him.

“She is no easier to work with.”

Nyota bites back what she wants to say, that the Commander isn’t particularly easy to work with either and that she rather commiserates with the Ambassador.

“Did you tell her?” she asks instead of voicing that thought.

“No.”

“Have you told anyone else who might have told her?”

“No.”

“Well, does she have anyway of knowing?”

“If she is psi sensitive to the degree she can sense that neither of us are engaged in relationships, then she should be able to tell that has changed without any overt gesture on our parts. It is necessary that she believe that we-“

“Yeah, I know.” When his lips tighten nearly imperceptibly, she amends her interruption. “I am aware, sir.”

“If we cannot find a tenable solution, I will not have time to continue to help you with your project,” he says and she feels her stomach sink.

“I’ll think of something,” Nyota promises. Her heart, as it does so often when he just looks at her like that, cool and assessing, starts to hammer in her chest and she wishes he wouldn’t scrutinize her so closely.

“See that you do,” he finally says, and then holds his hand out for her notes, which she hands over reluctantly, sure that it’ll take him no more than five seconds to find an error in them.

It takes him three and she wishes, not for the first time, that she had taken Gaila up on her suggestion of a summer full of beaches, swimming, and fruity drinks.

Her mood is no better when she gets back to her dorm that night. Finding Gaila relaxing on her bed watching a holovid and halfway through a bowl of popcorn only makes it worse, the tension behind her eyes blooming into a full blown headache.

“What’s wrong?” Gaila asks around a mouthful of popcorn.

“Nobody believes we’re dating.”

“No. I’m shocked,” Gaila says, rolling her eyes and digging into the bowl for another handful.

“Gaila…” Nyota reaches for a handful of her own, but Gaila pulls the bowl away before she can grab any.

“Nope. Popcorn is reserved for those of us with the proper enthusiasm for fake dating.”

“I would have more enthusiasm if he wasn’t such a…” Nyota trails off before she lets herself think of the dozen or so words in as many languages that would be appropriate descriptors for the Commander.

“Ok, so you’re not exactly his biggest fan, and while I’m pretty sure you could rectify that by checking out his butt, you seem – illogically, I might add – against that idea. And aren’t you half convinced he hates you?”

“He does. This was a mistake. It’s weird. And awkward. And for the record, yes, I know he’s Vulcan, but he’s terrible at this.”

“But he’s so handsome.”

“I just wish I had never started this with him if it’s going to be like this all summer.”

“But you did.”

“But I did,” Nyota agrees.

“And you love your paper.”

“And I love my paper.”

“And you’re going to make this work.”

“I’m going to make this work,” Nyota echoes with a groan, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “I just don’t know how.”

“That’s why you have me,” Gaila says simply and Nyota’s not sure whether to feel relieved or nauseous.


	4. Chapter 4

“So I did some research,” Nyota says when the Commander has settled into the chair across from her at the café.

“I would assume so.”

“No, I mean… I obviously did the reading you assigned. But I also did some research on the various courtship rituals of different species.” 

“I see.”

“I, uh, couldn’t find anything about Vulcans, though.”

“Vulcans do not date.”

“Yeah I guessed that.”

He looks even blanker than normal, if that’s even possible.

“How was that the inference you drew?”

“I, ah…” she starts, then pauses, trying to think of an explanation other than the obvious fact that he doesn’t act like he’s ever tried to make someone like him in his life. Instead, she searches for something else that’s equally true and not quite as… honest. “I study xenolinguistics nearly exclusively. When I couldn’t find any references to a similar cultural practice in your language or any of the materials I reviewed, that seemed the most… logical deduction. Cultures don’t tend to have words for practices or customs that don’t exist.”

He doesn’t say anything and she bites at the inside of her cheek, wondering if he’s going to speak or if she should keep going.

“So,” she finally says, taking a quick sip of her tea and placing it carefully back down on the table between them. “I found that most societies do what we’re doing: meet often, are seen together in public. But there’s other stuff too, obviously, like telling their friends about the other. And, uh, humans touch each other in public, sometimes. Depending. Not strictly necessary.” She carefully lines up her stylus with the edge of her padd so that they’re parallel, grimacing inwardly at the idea of bodily contact with him.

“Is that what you suggest?” he asks and if he didn’t look so stern she would guess he was equally horrified at the idea of actually touching each other.

“No, no, not at all. But I was thinking about what you said about the Ambassador being psi sensitive enough to be able to know that we weren’t actually dating, so probably the simplest thing to do would be to just tell her.”

“If we discuss this with her, she will likely realize that our focus is solely on your paper.”

“That’s not that bad, plus there’s no sense in keeping it from her. And anyway, we discuss other things, like the details of our arrangement,” Nyota adds with a wry grin.

“Why would we want her to know that? Does that not interfere with our goal of-“

“It was a joke. Sir.”

“It was not amusing.”

“Apparently.” Nyota bites back a long sigh. “I don’t think there’s any reason to keep the fact that you’re my advisor from her, and it might help your work with her if we’re a bit more upfront about how much we’ve been seeing each other.”

“That is your only suggestion?”

Nyota worries at her upper lip with her teeth for a moment. “I think that unless you want to start really acting like we’re dating, such as getting to know each other, discussing our lives and our families, meeting each other’s friends and all, this is the simplest way.”

She doesn’t add that she doesn’t particularly want to do that and can’t imagine that he would, so she’s relieved when he just gives her a brisk nod.

“Taking the most straightforward avenue to resolving this is logical. Please inform her at your earliest convenience,” he says, holding his hand out for her padd. “Today, I wish to discuss the relevancy of your line of inquiry into colloquial Organian.”

“You want me to be the one to…” she trails off, feeling her stomach clench. He’s there, and he’s willing to help her with her paper even with the Ambassador being no easier to work with, so she swallows down her argument that he should be the one to have the discussion with the Saiph. “Right. Great. I will… do that.”

…

“This is a terrible idea,” Nyota whispers to Gaila at the door to the mess hall, so that her roommate has to push a finger into her back, hard, to get Nyota to step forward. “I can’t believe he’s making me do this, I don’t even know what to say to her.”

“We practiced. Go,” Gaila whispers back. “Go, go, go.”

“This is not a special ops mission.”

“It should be with how hopeless you two are,” Gaila hisses in reply. “Go!” 

It’s maybe thirty feet to where the Ambassador is tearing into what looks like a rib eye and each step of the way Nyota feels her stomach twist with nerves and something that feels a lot like revulsion as she watches the Saiph chew the bloody meat.

“Greetings,” Nyota says in Saiphian and to her surprise, the Ambassador lifts a long fingered hand in an approximation of a human wave.

“Greetings.”

“Are you enjoying your stay on Earth so far?” Nyota asks as brightly as she can.

“No.”

“Oh. Well, is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”

“No.”

Nyota nods quickly and tries not to focus on how incredibly dour the Ambassador looks, folded into a chair and just staring back at her silently.

“Let me know if you think of anything.” The Ambassador just blinks at her. “Right. Um, do you mind if I eat with you?”

“I do not.”

“Great. That’s great,” Nyota says, quickly sinking into the chair across from the Amabassador and pulling out a protein bar, which, when Gaila came up with this plan, she decided would be the only food she could stomach when faced with the Saiph’s dietary habits.

“You are solitary,” the Ambassador informs her and Nyota quickly nods. She and Gaila decided that there was no use a trying to convince the Ambassador she and the Commander were particularly close to each other, not if the Saiph could tell they weren’t.

“I am, yes,” Nyota says, unwrapping her bar and taking a bite, even though her stomach rolls every time she looks at the Saiph’s plate. “But I’ve been having tea with Commander Spock recently.”

She doesn’t know where the line is between the Ambassador’s telepathic ability to tell whether or not she’s in a relationship intersects with the face value of her words, so she tries as hard as she can to focus on the good parts of her meetings with the Commander. It’s not the easiest thing to do, since she mostly enjoys them being over, but there have been at least a handful of times that their conversations have sparked an interesting topic of discussion and she latches onto those memories.

“What is tea?”

Nyota swallows a bite of her bar. “It’s a hot drink made with fragrant, aromatic-“

“No. What is it to have tea?”

“Oh, its um…. Well we’ve been seeing each other. For that and for a couple meals. To spend time together,” she clarifies. “For discussion and conversation.”

Nyota wipes her palms on her skirt and forces herself to meet the Ambassador’s gaze, even though she feels scrutinized under the unflinching attention.

“Conversation,” the Ambassador repeats.

“The Commander is really quite well read,” Nyota says quickly, glossing over the fact that she’s pretty sure Commander Spock finds her less than aptly educated in certain matters and seems to have taken it upon himself to dump dozens of readings on her to rectify that. “He’s very interesting to talk to.”

“You are meeting him for these discussions?”

“Yes, quite often. It’s… illuminating.”

“And yet you remain solitary?”

“Oh, well,” Nyota shrugs, trying for a quick grin. “It’s not always so easy in my culture, to go from tea to something more serious.”

The Ambassador falls silent and Nyota is reminded of the Commander’s dark gaze in the way the Saiph watches her. Just when she wants to start fidgeting, or playing with the wrapper of her protein bar, the Ambassador leans back in her chair and steeples her fingers together.

“How long to become non-solitary.”

“It can depend. Sometimes it’s love at first sight for couples, and other times you have to spend quite a bit of time together.”

“You want to spend time with the Commander?” the Ambassador asks and Nyota swallows under her shrewd gaze, knowing the true answer to that question is not something she wants to share.

“He’s a very interesting man,” Nyota explains carefully, her heart hammering. “But it’s hard with our schedules. I have this project I’m working on this summer, and he’s so busy…”

“That is an impediment?”

“Well it can be. And he-“

“-Is here.”

“What?” Nyota asks, spinning in her chair to look where the Ambassador’s pointing. She hopes the other woman takes the way she starts as something that’s bordering on delight, not the knot that’s quickly growing in her stomach at the sight of him engaged in an animated conversation with an Andorian – or animated for him, at least, the Commander nodding and the Andorian’s antenna waving back and forth as he speaks.

Just as the Ambassador points him out, Commander Spock turns towards them and across the mess hall, she sees his gaze flick rapidly back and forth between her and the Ambassador.

He quickly excuses himself from his conversation and in a series of long strides is at the edge of their table before Nyota is quite ready for him to be there.

“Hi,” she offers. He doesn’t speak and Nyota has nothing more to add, so the three of them just hang in an uncomfortable silence for a long moment. Him being present for her conversation with the Ambassador was not in the plan and the Ambassador actually witnessing them together is a painful thought. “We were just having lunch,” Nyota finally explains, gesturing to the Ambassador. 

“Sit,” the Ambassador orders and inwardly Nyota groans. 

The Commander looks from her to the Ambassador, to the empty chair next to Nyota. He lowers himself into it carefully, settling so that he’s as far from her as he can be without actually picking up the chair and moving it.

“You have been having tea,” the Ambassador says in a tone that Nyota thinks is nothing less than accusatory.

“We have been,” Nyota answers, trying to make her tone light. It mostly comes out strained. “It’s been great, actually, since he’s helping me, or, well, serving as an advisor for a project I’m working on this summer.” She’s rehearsed this in her head a dozen times, but even so, it feels strange to actually articulate the ruse aloud. And it doesn’t help that the Commander’s sitting so incredibly stiffly beside her.

“You have been spending time together,” the Ambassador says and even though it’s not quite a question, Nyota enthusiastically nods.

“Yeah, it’s been really…” she tries to say fun but can’t without lying, so she settles on, “Interesting. Right?” 

The Commander just blinks in response to her question and she has the sudden urge to kick him under the table. 

“Our conversations have been adequate,” he finally gets out and Nyota feels something hot burn in her chest. If – when – she finds Gaila and forces her to apologize for ever suggesting this entire debacle, the very next thing she’s going to do is have her roommate witness her swearing a very solemn oath to never, ever actually date someone who calls spending time with her ‘adequate.’

The Ambassador sits completely still except for the quick, rapid darting of her eyes between Nyota and Spock, so that between the Saiph and the Commander’s own focus on her, she feels the skin on the back of her neck start to crawl with the scrutiny.

“The cadet does not like you,” the Ambassador finally says and Nyota wants to bury her face in her hands.

“That’s really not…” she starts but can’t quite bring herself to say that it’s not true. “As I said, we haven’t had that much time together since we’re both so busy with work.”

“You need more time so that you are able to become non-solitary,” the Ambassador says and Nyota nods.

“Yes, it would really be easier for us if the Commander’s work could-“

“I will send you the specifications you asked for, Commander,” the Ambassador says.

If she wasn’t so mortified from having the Ambassador point out that she’s less than fond of the Commander, Nyota might find it amusing how he very nearly looks surprised, his mouth slightly parted and his eyes widening at the Saiph’s words.

“That would be greatly appreciated.”

“You will clean this while I return to my quarters to prepare the documents,” the Ambassador orders, rising from the table and pushing her plate towards the Commander.

He waits until the Ambassador has left the mess hall before recoiling from the plate, pushing his chair back slightly and looking away from the heap of raw meat on it.

“I can take that,” Nyota offers, watching him swallow and tuck his hands into his lap. As uncharitable as she normally feels towards him, shoving a plate of meat at a Vulcan hardly seems conscionable. Still, she takes a page out of his book and doesn’t bother to say good-bye before tossing the wrapper from her bar onto the plate and heading towards the trash receptacles.

She’s in the middle of imagining a scenario where she can sit the Ambassador and Commander down for a talk about interspecies courtesies, probably with a set of slides and handouts as to how to not come off as terribly rude, when she notices he’s followed her.

“Thank you.”

“It’s no problem,” she says, sliding the meat off the plate and into the garbage with a wet plop. “I would guess that she doesn’t know you’re a vegetarian, but I’m also not entirely sure that would have stopped her.”

“Rather, I meant for your assistance in procuring the specification sheet. I have been asking her for access to it for the last eighteen days.”

“I told you I’d figure something out,” she replies, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. She should’ve guessed he would be surprised that she came up with a solution, but it still stings. “I have reading to get to, sir, if you’ll excuse me.”

“What did the Ambassador mean when you said you do not like me?” he asks and she feels heat rush to her face.

She freezes, unsure she can answer him without either stammering or snapping that the Saiph’s reasoning should be incredibly, logically obvious. She forces herself to take a deep breath, and then another one, stalling so that she can think through a more appropriate response.

“Before you arrived, I was telling her that we didn’t get to spend much time together,” Nyota hedges. “And that because of that we don’t know each other very well.”

“That is not what she seemed to be implying.”

“If you know, then why did you ask me?” Nyota asks, her voice far sharper than she intends. “I’m sorry, sir. Sorry for, uh, saying it like that.”

“Saiphs are a psi sensitive race and in many ways their telepathic abilities resemble those of Betazeds or Deltans, though they are not quite as empathic,” he explains and Nyota resists the urge to roll her eyes. Saiph’s being able to pick up on relationships and impressions is fairly obvious to her, and the root of the whole problem they’re having with the Ambassador knowing they’re not actually dating.

“Yes, I know that.”

“She was correct when she said you do not like me, was she not?”

Nyota swallows.

“As I said, I don’t really know you, sir.”

“You did not answer the question.”

She presses her lips together. 

“I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

“Honesty is preferable, Cadet.”

“Look, does it matter, sir? You just said that you got the documents you’ve wanted for nearly three weeks-“

“Eighteen days,” he corrects and she feels a muscle in her jaw clench.

“Eighteen days,” she amends. “I don’t see what the issue is if I resolved the problem you were having with her.”

“I would not want the Ambassador to dwell on any interpersonal issues between us.”

“If you are concerned that my performance will be affected, I can assure you that-“

“I am concerned that this remains an untenable situation, for even if she is amenable to assisting me at this juncture, if you are unable to control your emotions then it does not logically follow that her help will continue to be available.”

“I will be fine, sir,” she says, forcing her tone to be even. 

“See that you are,” he says, turning on his heel and walking away without another word. When he’s gone, she lets out a long breath and lets herself sag against the wall.

It’s a summer, not her whole life, and there’s no way this can be more awkward or uncomfortable or unpleasant than what she’ll face in the rest of her career when dealing with other cultures.

She imagines, again, having her paper published. She just hopes that image is enough to keep her going for the rest of this project and pushes off the wall to head back to the library. 

…

“You are gripping your stylus with unnecessary force,” the Commander interrupts her to say.

“What?”

“You are upset.”

“I’m fine.”

“Verbalizing that you are, as you say ‘fine’ does not reduce or belie the psychosomatic response to irritation, anger, distress, or displeasure.”

“Thanks for the information.” She bends over her padd so she won’t have to look at him. “So this article on Trill verbs that you sent me-“

“You said you would be able to control your emotional response.”

“Which is something I am currently seeking to do, sir,” she says, pushing down the hot rush in her throat and focusing on her padd. “May we return to the discussion of the article?”

It’s the third time they’ve met since Nyota’s discussion with the Ambassador, and her and the Commander’s subsequent talk afterwards. She’s resorted to longer runs, increased time complaining to Gaila, and more than once has let Gaila drag her to the bar to deal with her irritation over her discussions with Commander Spock with a cocktail in her hand. 

It helps, but apparently not enough.

“You said the Ambassador is joining us for lunch?” Nyota asks, releasing the hold she has on her stylus and concentrating on setting it gently on the table.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to take a couple minute’s break, then,” she says, rising and ignoring the way a crease forms on his brow at her words.

Figures that not being able to work for four hours straight would be yet another thing that would displease him, she thinks as she walks briskly to doors of the mess hall, wishing they were the old fashioned kind she could jerk open. Instead, they smoothly part for her, so she satisfies herself by flicking open her comm with more force than is necessary.

“I’m developing anger management issues,” she says when Gaila picks up.

“Hello to you, too.”

“Tell me again why this is a good idea?”

“He. Is. Gorgeous.”

“Gaila…”

“Oh, fine. Paper. Resume. Lieutenant stripes. Your insatiable need to be perfect. The Enterprise.”

“He’s the first officer on the Enterprise,” Nyota sighs. She never would have believed anything would temper the dream of that ship for her, but Commander Spock has somehow managed to.

“You’ll never see him. We’ll be too busy fucking our way through-“

“Gaila.”

“Geez, fine, screwing our way through all the security officers. Yum. Their training regimen, Ny, let me tell you.”

Nyota does let Gaila tell her and chalks it up to how crazy the Commander makes her that she actually listens to her roommate’s explanation of security officer training and its subsequent impact on humanoid musculature.

“Thanks,” Nyota says softly when Gaila finally winds down.

“Just think, Commander Spock is the only man I’ve ever seen get you so riled up. I’m telling you, you suffer through this and the sex is going to be-“

“Gaila!”

“What? Cause I was just kidding about all the red shirts. You and him are-”

“Bye. Thanks, but goodbye.”

Gaila’s still laughing when they hang up and the sound buoys Nyota back inside, no matter how ridiculous her roommate is.

Of course, her stomach sinks when she lays eyes on the Commander again, and sinks farther when she realizes the Ambassador is already there.

She takes her time choosing ingredients for her salad, stalling the inevitable. When she can’t spend any longer deciding what dressing she wants, she approaches the table and places her plate where she had been sitting earlier.

“You remain solitary,” the Ambassador says to her and it makes Nyota want to hand out pamphlets to her and the Commander on how to say hello to a human.

“We’ve been seeing more of each other,” Nyota says, steeling herself for the lunch she’s about to have with the two of them. She sits carefully back in her seat, trying to remember how to act relaxed and like she doesn’t want to just bolt out of there. “He’s had so much more time recently.”

“That is good.”

“It is good,” Nyota agrees. It actually has been great, in it’s own way, since with the Commander’s schedule freed up by the Ambassadors recent cooperation, she’s gotten more done on her paper than she would have expected. Their relationship might be tense but they do work well together and he’s found more than a few sources for her that have filled in holes in her research she may have not found herself.

“However, you both continue to be solitary.”

Nyota nods and take a quick bite of lettuce, chewing while she thinks of what to say. The Commander isn’t exactly any help, remaining silent as he stirs his soup and casts occasional glances at the Ambassador’s plate.

“Well, like I said, it can take time,” Nyota finally answers.

“Being solitary is disagreeable.”

Nyota just nods again, trying to focus her thoughts on anything but the fact that spending any time with the Commander is in and of itself rather disagreeable.

“You still do not like him,” the Ambassador says and the Commander glances up from his soup at Nyota.

“Well, I-“ she starts.

“You have had time to come to know him.”

“Yes, we have…” Nyota starts and tries to bite back the ire that the Commander is just sitting there, seemingly uninterested in helping her with this turn in the conversation. “You see-“

“Spock!” she hears and looks up to see the Andorian the Commander was speaking to the other day. He approaches with a wide smile stretched across his blue face, both antenna waving excitedly and despite dietary choices so similar to a Saiph, Nyota’s has never been so thankful to see someone approach with a tray of bloody meat, if for no other reason than the Ambassador and the Commander have both stopped staring at her.

“Doctor,” the Commander responds and if she didn’t know better she might have guessed that he sounded nearly relieved at the other man’s sudden presence.

“Good, right?” the Andorian asks, sitting down next to the Ambassador and nodding at her plate. He points to a large bone the Ambassador has been gnawing on. “Those are a delicacy on Andor, I’m glad you’ve been enjoying it.”

“Who are you?” the Ambassador asks.

“Oh, am I interrupting?” The Andorian points an antenna at the Commander, who is looking stonily back at him. 

“This is Doctor Puri,” Commander Spock says.

“I am, I am,” he chuckles, his antennae drawing quick circles in the air. “And you must be the Ambassador that Spock’s working with, and you must be…”

“Uhura,” she supplies.

“Nice to meet you,” the doctor says, extending one blue hand.

His skin is cooler than she expects and his handshake is slightly off, like he hasn’t quite mastered the Terran gesture, but he smiles at her again and she feels the tension that’s settled in her stomach ease slightly.

“Nice to meet you as well.”

“You are not solitary,” the Ambassador tells him.

“I’m not… what?”

“The Ambassador is referring to the fact that you are married,” the Commander explains.

“The Commander and Cadet have been having tea,” the Ambassador says.

“What?” Puri asks again, one antenna pointing at the Commander and Ambassador in turn.

“It is excellent that you are not solitary,” the Ambassador continues without pausing. “And this food is also excellent. You are excellent. Thank you for joining us.”

“Thank you.” The doctor bends both antennae briefly in the Ambassador’s direction before poking one back towards the Commander. “So. This is a real treat for you, Spock, isn’t it? Pike has a bit of a sense of humor, doesn’t he?” he asks, glancing at his own plate and the Ambassador’s before looking up at the Commander again. “And what is this about tea?”

“They have been meeting for tea in a quest to become less solitary.”

“Less…” the doctor starts, looking between Nyota and the Commander before his antennae stick straight up and his eyes widen. “Really. No. Really?”

“An admirable pursuit, though they are less than adept at it,” the Ambassador says.

“Less than adept,” Puri echoes slowly and to Nyota’s surprise shoots the Commander a huge grin before turning towards her. “Well then it’s extra nice to meet you, Cadet. Need a few pointers, Spock?”

“Hardly.”

“Is this the first thing you’ve ever been ‘less than adept’ at?” The Commander doesn’t answer which just makes the doctor laugh loudly. “I’m going to tell the entire bridge crew, Spock.”

“Please restrain yourself, Doctor.”

“I’m going to get Hawkins to send out a memo. Pike will love this.”

“Doctor…”

The Andorian just chuckles, stabbing at a piece of steak as his antennae gently wave back and forth.

Nyota has never seen anyone act so comfortably around the Commander and it has her reeling a bit, so that when Puri starts speaking to her, it takes her a moment to get her mouth to work.

“So you two met how?”

“Oh, I was his… I, uh, just finished his class.”

“Page out of my book, Spock. That’s the Terran saying, right Uhura?” he asks and when she nods, one antenna bounces up and down. “That’s just how I met my wife. And I’m not sure who this will make happier, her or the Captain.”

“You were her professor?” Nyota asks, her interest piqued by hearing that it’s less rare than she would have thought for couples to meet like that in Starfleet.

“Other way around,” he answers, swallowing a mouthful of steak. “Way back when Commander Spock was Cadet Spock and I wasn’t even a doctor yet.”

Nyota doesn’t know if it’s harder to wrap her mind around what good friends Puri and the Commander seem to be, or the notion that the austere, reserved Vulcan in instructor blacks sitting next to her was ever young enough to be a cadet.

“Doctor, this line of discussion is hardly relevant.”

“I’ve been doing inventories for Pike all morning, I need some fun,” Puri says, one antenna leveling at the Commander.

“Doctor-“

“We were roommates at the Academy,” Puri whispers loudly, leaning across the table towards Nyota, who finds herself smiling despite herself. 

“Really?” she asks, trying to figure out how a Vulcan could comfortably live with someone raised on an ice planet.

“It was great,” he nods. “And I have quarters across the hall from him on the Enterprise now, so as soon as we have those dilithium crystals and can take her out for her first trial flights, I can go back to messing with his environmental controls as much as I want to.”

“Please refrain,” the Commander says but all the formality that normally colors his voice when he speaks to Nyota is gone. 

She glances up at him, surprised by the change in his tone, but he’s just eating his soup as calmly as ever.

“You’re on the Enterprise, too, then?” Nyota asks. She’s interested in anything and everything about that ship, and having an officer on it who’s actually willing to talk, as opposed to just point out her spelling mistakes has suddenly turned this lunch into something of a treat.

“Chief Medical Officer,” Puri answers with a smile.

“And you said that Hawkins is…”

“Comms chief. And we have McKenna on the helm and Olson in Engineering, and Spock here and a handful of others. No navigator yet, Pike’s still looking for someone to fill that position.”

“That’s great,” Nyota says. “I had no idea the ship was so fully staffed already.”

“No idea?” Puri asks. “What do you two talk about then? Spock’s nearly beside himself with excitement.” They both turn and look at the Commander’s bland expression and the doctor bursts out laughing again, his antennae shaking with the force of it. “Well, you know what I mean. Pike has nearly the whole senior staff already assembled even though it’s probably two years until we’re really ready to ship out for good. Can’t say I blame him for being anxious to get going. We’re all dying to spend a month or two on space flight trials.”

“That is a hyperbole.”

For some reason beyond Nyota’s understanding, the Commander’s terse remark only makes Puri smile.

“You don’t know that. I’m CMO, Spock, right now I could be rushing off to Sickbay to help save some poor bridge officer who spent too long dreaming of the stars and warp trails and freedom from the monotony of the Academy and Spacedock life,” Puri grins, cutting himself another piece of his raw steak.

“Is that a common medical emergency?” the Commander asks and Puri laughs around his mouthful, his blue hand rising to cover his mouth.

“Might be if we never get our dilithium crystals,” the doctor answers, swallowing. He bows both antennae towards the Ambassador. 

“Commander Spock’s relationship status is unpleasant to work with,” the Ambassador says. “It slows the process considerably. I would prefer to work with someone who is not solitary.”

“Well, you’re out of luck with me, I’m afraid. I’m in charge of hyposprays, medical records, and that’s about it. I don’t have the big brain our Commander here does,” Puri says. “And speaking of big brains, what are you two doing with all of this. Isn’t it summer?”

The doctor nods to the stacks of padds at the edge of the table and Nyota follows his gaze, wishing she was either alone with her work in the library, Vulcans and Saiph’s not invited, or that Puri could come to all of her and the Commander’s meetings.

“The Commander is Cadet Uhura’s research advisor,” the Ambassador explains and only sounds slightly less disapproving than when she was calling him unpleasant.

“Wow, tea and research, sure you don’t want any advice, Spock?” the doctor grins, taking the last bite of his steak. The Commander just looks steadily back at him, and though that blank gaze makes Nyota nervous and tense, the Doctor just continues to smile. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Surprised?”

“That you’d finally find someone who wanted to spend the summer reviewing…” the Doctor reaches out and pulls one of Nyota’s texts towards him. “Theories of Trill Sociolinguistics? You must be a comm major, Uhura. Focusing in Xenoling?”

“Yes,” she answers, watching him scroll through the first few pages. 

“And here I thought Spock was teaching those classes because he likes to be around people who use ‘literally’ in its strict definition, and not as a figure of speech.”

The misuse of ‘literally’ is, as Gaila’s pointed out more than once, one of Nyota’s biggest pet peeves.

“One of the benefits of the department,” she agrees, finding herself smiling for the first time since she met up with the Commander that morning.

“Well, I don’t want to interrupt you two. Literally. Nice to meet you, Cadet. Also, literally.”

“You too,” she says, wishing he wasn’t going to leave.

“I will join you. It is more pleasant to be with one who is joined,” the Ambassador says, rising from her place as Puri does, and at least that’s something, not having to be with both the Commander and the Ambassador. “They should have time to become less solitary.”

“Let me know how it goes,” Puri chuckles. “Spock, I’m going to be calling you for details tonight.”

“You will do no such thing.”

Puri just laughs again and holds out his hand for Nyota’s empty plate.

“Oh, thank you, sir,” she says and one antenna flicks towards her in acknowledgement.

He takes Spock’s bowl and the Ambassador’s half eaten meal as well. The Ambassador follows him as he recycles their dishes and even from across the mess hall, it’s clear how animated she is when speaking to him and how their conversation flows far more easily than it does when she speaks to Nyota or Spock.

“She is more willing to work with him than with me,” the Commander says and she looks over to see that he’s also watching them.

“Well, you were the one who said he was married.”

The Commander nods slowly. “I was under the impression that the arrangement between the two of us would engender a similar rapport with the Ambassador.”

“I was too,” Nyota admits. She gestures to where the Ambassador and Doctor are deep in conversation. “I think that if you want… that, then things might have to change between us.”

“I do not understand the issue you have with me.”

“I-“

“You are consistently irritated by me.”

“Sometimes,” she finally admits. “I try not to be, but yes.”

“Why?”

She rolls her bottom lip between her teeth, hesitating.

“I’m really not comfortable with this conversation, sir, and I-“

“I am simply seeking an explanation as to the impetus for your vexation. I assure you I will not be offended as a human would be by such information.”

She bites back a retort about humans being rather justified in their frustration, and instead tempers her tone as much as she can. “Sometimes you interrupt me while I’m speaking.”

“What else?”

“Uh, you don’t ever say hello or goodbye.”

“That is a cause for annoyance?”

“Well…” She grimaces and chooses her words carefully. “It’s not very polite.”

“And it causes you such extreme irritation?”

“It’s not just that, it’s also like a hundred other things.”

“A hundred exactly or is that an approximation?”

“See? It’s that, right there. You’re always doing stuff like that, or correcting me on something, or telling me I’m wrong and it’s just constant.”

“It could hardly be constant or we would never have an opportunity to discuss your paper.”

“Fine.” She crosses her arms over her chest and tries not to glare. “It’s not literally constant. But it is more often than is necessary.”

“You are a communications track cadet, so I would presume that you understand the importance of precision and efficiency in language,” he says dispassionately. “These are not causes for indignation.”

“Nor is precision or efficiency a reason to never greet me, nor to let a single phrase go uncritiqued.” 

“Perhaps you should exercise greater patience, Cadet.”

“Perhaps you should consider that this is not solely my fault,” she snaps. “There are two of us having these conversations, sir.”

“You are aware that I am Vuclan.”

“You are equally aware that I am human.”

“Humans can often be overly sensitive to-“

“Look. I expect some amount of the respect you would afford someone of another culture, ok?”

Something flashes across his expression, but it’s too brief and too subtle for her to figure it out, and it’s gone before she can begin to try.

“Such as?”

“Such as… such as everything, sir. You act like you’ve never worked with humans before, which can’t be true. Does it not logically follow that if you want me to simply brush off each and every time that you violate a form of politeness my culture observes, that I can expect an equal and comparable accommodation from you? In what scenario is it fair that I simply accept you interrupting me, correcting me, and frankly being quite rude in every manner of the word, while you make no compromises yourself?”

She takes a deep breath and presses her lips together, her heart thudding in her chest. He would be completely in line to censure her for such an outburst, but it still wouldn’t invalidate her point. She and Gaila have been negotiating and meeting each other halfway ever since they were assigned to be roommates and while it’s led to various sacrifices Nyota never thought she would ever be asked to make, Gaila has made plenty of her own.

She looks up at him to find him watching her with his mouth slightly parted. He closes it immediately when he sees her looking, but otherwise remains completely still and silent.

“I just don’t think that’s too much to ask,” she finally says, trying to school the way her heart is racing under the weight of his gaze on her.

“I do not find your evidence sufficient to have caused you such distress.”

“It doesn’t have to be sufficient to you, you don’t get to decide that, it’s how I feel.”

He just stares at her, like somehow standing there studying her will answer whatever isn’t clear to him. His scrutiny makes her shift awkwardly on her feet, then chew on her lip, and then set her jaw as she tries to resist glaring at a senior officer.

“You are not being logical,” he finally declares and she reaches up to pinch the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.

“Is that some sort of requirement for you?” 

“Naturally.”

“Look, you’re not pretending to be in a relationship with another Vulcan, you’re pretending to be in one with a human,” she says, knowing her voice is rising but quite unable to help herself. 

“And you with a Vulcan.”

“Trust me, that is more than apparent.”

“Is it?”

“Look…I can’t - this with us…”

“Please just say what you mean instead of obfuscating your opinion.”

“Fine. Frankly, nobody in their right mind would date you like this.”

“The same could be said for you,” he says coolly and she feels her jaw clench.

“I get that you come from a different culture-“

“Truly?”

“Truly?” she echoes, anger rising hot and fast in her chest. “Yes, of course I do. And can you really stand there and pretend you know nothing about human social norms after spending so many years in Starfleet? Is that logical in the slightest? I can’t imagine you would treat Captain Pike like this.”

For the first time he hesitates.

“No,” he admits and she sighs. She raises her hand to rub at her forehead and doesn’t bother to drop it in order to look at him when he speaks again. “However, I have professional relationships with my human colleagues and a degree of compromise on my part is necessitated by my position in Starfleet.”

“Is this not professional?”

“I do not recall you requesting greater interpersonal concessions as my student, Cadet,” he says blandly and she swallows the hot rush that rises in her throat. 

“You’re not listening to my point.”

“I do not believe you are particularly extending much energy to considering my own,” he responds and she has to look away from him for a long moment as she takes a deep breath, and then another one, trying to resist the urge to just scoff at his remark.

“I think that maybe this arrangement between us was ill advised,” she finally says when she’s sure she can keep her voice steady.

“You would like to discontinue your project?” he asks and her stomach sinks at the thought.

“No. But I wanted this to be simpler than it is, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen, is it?” 

He doesn’t answer, but his silence says enough. 

She’s got all her filmplasts neatly stacked and in her bag when he finally speaks.

“Cadet-“

“What?”

“Will you consider-“

“No, I’m sorry but I can’t do this with you.” 

“Cadet-“

“Thank you for your help so far, sir, I’m sure you’ll see this paper published in a journal once I find an advisor next semester. Goodbye, Commander.”

She quickly gathers up the rest of her research and shuffles the padds into her bag, tossing her stylus in on top of that, and turns and walks away from him. 

She looks back, once, when she’s reached the door, but he’s just standing in the same spot, so she steps out into the night air, shaking her head to clear it of the fog of anxiety and annoyance and disappointment, already resolving to not think about him again.


	5. Chapter 5

“No,” Gaila gasps. “You broke up with your fake boyfriend who’s actually your research advisor and who is also your former professor? Nyota Uhura!”

“We didn’t ‘break up’, Gaila, we were never actually dating. We parted ways professionally and I’ll just figure out what to do about this project next semester.”

“So you’re not currently working on it,” Gaila says slowly.

“Guess not,” Nyota sighs, rubbing at her forehead. “All that research. So many hours, you know?”

“I do know. I know a lot of things. Such as that human females enjoy the company of friends and the consumption of alcohol and ice cream after a break up.”

“Again, Gaila, we didn’t break up because-”

“-But if you never really date, which you don’t, you can never really break up, so this is the closest I’ll ever come to having a wild night out on the town with you to cheer you up over some guy. I know, I know,” she says, holding up her hands, green palms facing Nyota. “Replace ‘guy’ with ‘paper’ and it’ll be more accurate. But I’ll magnanimously forgive you for that if you put on that red dress that’s been collecting dust for months now and a pair of heels and maybe a bra that isn’t completely horrendous.”

“I don’t know,” Nyota says, shaking her head. “I’m not sure I’m up for going out.”

“This is my chance to console you post break up. Are you really going to take this away from me?”

“Yes?”

“No,” Gaila tells her, her voice as stern as Commander Spock’s has ever been. “Get dressed. Let’s go.”

…

Nyota’s first completely free day of summer break dawns bright and clear and she lays in bed staring at the ceiling with a sense of emptiness she hasn’t felt in longer than she can remember.

When she finally gets up, she kicks her bag with her padds of research in it under her bed and tries to forget about it and enjoy the free time. But her headache, which she blames on Gaila, and the nagging, vacant feeling of a summer with no research and no work grates at her until she finally pulls on her running shoes and decides to sweat out her hangover and disappointment.

Which is a really great plan for the time between the first ten minutes of her jog when she just wants to die and the moment she runs into Commander Spock.

He’s with the Ambassador again, who is quite clearly ignoring him. The way the Saiph is ignoring him makes Nyota wonder if he’s told the Ambassador that they’re no longer seeing each other, or if the she is just frustrated to be back with the Commander rather than the sensibly married Doctor Puri. Either way, her long robes and hair snap and billow in the wind as she walks away from the Commander, who has to nearly jog to keep up with her. 

Nyota’s favorite running route takes her right past where they’re walking and she tamps down on the urge to avoid them.

“Sir,” she nods as she reaches him. She’s not particularly surprised when he doesn’t greet her, just watches her with those dark eyes as she jogs past.

And that seems to be it. 

She sees him around occasionally but he doesn’t approach her and after the first time he barely glances her way.

But their last conversation still chafes at her and somewhere between her annoyance and indignation and underneath the irritation that the very thought of him instills in her, she can’t help but wonder about the ramifications of being so… honest with a commanding officer.

And honesty isn’t even it, rather a plainly brutal critique of the Commander’s interpersonal skills which didn’t acquit her particularly well as a budding communications officer.

“Was I out of line?” she finally asks Gaila over Cardassian Sunrises.

“No. If you hadn’t said all that to him, you’d be in the library.”

“I like the library. And I’m serious.”

Gaila shrugs and stirs her drink with one of the many cocktail umbrellas she weaseled out of the bartender. 

“Yes.”

“Gaila!”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to be supportive.”

“I thought you wanted me to be honest.”

“Yeah, but…”

“You want me to do that thing where humans pretend like their friends did nothing wrong and then never give advice that would actually be helpful?”

“Yes. Do exactly that.”

“Well, that’s just stupid. Look, knowing you, you could have probably toned down the feedback to him. Maybe you miss having Kirk around to yell at?”

“I do not miss Kirk,” Nyota sighs. “I have never been so happy to have him gone for a summer.”

“Well, I’m sure he misses you. He likes you, you know.”

Nyota just rolls her eyes, even though Gaila’s comment has its intended impact of making Nyota think kinder thoughts about Kirk than she is particularly partial too.

And it’s just as well that Gaila says out loud that Nyota’s too harsh sometimes, not that it isn’t something she doesn’t know about herself. Since the night she first met him a year ago, Kirk has on more than one occasion incited the same type of impatience that results in her snapping at him. While he mostly just smirks and sasses right back, there have been a handful of times his eyes have gotten a bit too wide and his reply a bit too stammered, so that it tugs somewhere down deep in Nyota’s gut.

As the days pass, she has the same reaction to the Commander’s continued, studied avoidance of her, and while she doesn’t renege on her sentiments, how uncomfortable she is with how she delivered them settles in her stomach like a knot that won’t quite go away.

“I think I messed up,” she finally admits to Gaila in the middle of a holovid they’re ostensibly watching, though Gaila’s engrossed in a lingerie catalog and Nyota’s worrying at her bottom lip, thinking all too hard for a Sunday afternoon.

“Hmm.”

“But I still meant what I said.”

“Uh huh.”

“I just…” Nyota starts, then lets herself trail off. She stares at the monitor, watching a human playing a Klingon - with a truly terrible Klingon accent - finally surrender to the group of Starfleet officers who have been trying to subdue him for half of the movie. “He’s still annoying, you know? I’m not going to ignore that.”

“You’re just mad he lowered you a number of scratches.”

“What?”

“Like how you mark how many sexual partners you’ve had.”

“I don’t-“

“On the piece of wood that supports your mattress.”

“Um-“

“I started recording mine on your bed since I ran out of space. And, you know, for a comm major, you’re terrible at this. Which was kind of his point, if you think about it.”

“His point? He’s the first officer of a ship and is in charge of hundreds of crewmembers and he’s the most unlikeable person I’ve ever met! Pike was crazy to hire him.”

“The Commander’s giant Vulcan brain undoubtedly eclipsed the fact that he’s not exactly warm and cuddly. Or oooh, I bet Pike just knows that the crew will love him because of his butt. I don’t know how you’re immune to that, Ny.”

“Probably because I had the pleasure of being exposed to his absolutely terrible personality.”

“You just don’t like that he’s as stubborn as you are.”

“That’s not it,” Nyota says and crosses her arms, glaring at the Klingon, who’s now revealed himself to be a Romulan in disguise. The actor’s accent in Romulan is even worse than in Klingon and Nyota glowers at the screen.

“Only you would think that you could be more obstinate than a Vulcan, Ny.”

Nyota’s nearly entirely sure that Gaila’s missing the point, but even so she’s not exactly working through an apology in her head.

And anyway, she and the Commander have proven quite capable of avoiding each other and ignoring the other when they do see each other, and as far as solutions go she’s completely fine with it. She’ll just deal with the fact he’s a senior officer on the ship she’s determined to be assigned to in two years when she’s done with the Academy, and until then she can continue alternating between righteous anger and wondering if yelling at him is going to have a detrimental effect on her career.

Which it might, she knows. It’s a thought that rises to the forefront of her thoughts more than once while her mind’s wandering during a long run or in the minutes before she falls asleep. It’s one thing to have the confidence to stand up to an officer but its something entirely different when that officer is an off-worlder and the altercation is over cultural issues. 

So, when she’s returning to her dorm one afternoon and sees him standing near the short flight of steps leading up to the entrance, her first thought is that not only is she in for a dressing down but also that it’s probably not completely undeserved.

“Sir,” she says as she approaches, dread welling in her chest hot and thick even as she wildly casts about for any evidence that he’s there for a reason other than to see her.

No such luck, though, since he watches her as she approaches and takes a step towards her as she draws near.

She’s so busy trying to formulate how best to explain that she still thinks he was being a jerk while couching that in a way that might salvage any chance she still has to be assigned to his ship that she completely misses his words when he speaks.

“What?”

“I said that I wished to apologize, Cadet. I was not certain as to what type of Terran flora would be appropriate.”

“Wait, what?”

“In lieu of deteriorating plant life-“

“Deteriorating? They’re not supposed to be… what’s going on? Why are you here?”

“Then why do humans insist on cutting the - Regardless, I brought you several journal articles which are on the topic of your paper, and which I do not believe you have come across as of yet.” 

He holds them out to her and she takes them, impressed despite herself. They’re helpful, actually really helpful at filling in a few missing links she hasn’t found sources for yet.

“Thank you,” she says, awkwardly shuffling them as she glances through them once more, stalling so that she doesn’t have to look up at him. Finding him standing outside her dorm is jarring, especially when she thought she’d already be upstairs by now, choosing yet another holovid to watch and continuing to lament the waste of time this summer has been.

“As I said, I wish to apologize to you,” he says carefully, slowly, like he’s worried she’s going to beat a hasty retreat now that she has her padds. “You were correct that my assumption that you should make the entirety of intercultural compromises was discourteous and therefore illogical.”

His words make her look up at him and she finds him watching her impassively. She tries to come up for something to say and ends up drawing a blank for a long minute, her mind traitorously empty under his scrutiny.

“Uh, thanks,” she finally says into the silence, just to have something to break the heavy discomfort between them.

He nods, a short, abrupt gesture before turning on his heel and walking away, leaving her opened mouthed, the padds he just handed her dangling at her side.

She’s about to call after him – to say what she doesn’t know – when he stops and turns so he’s looking back at her over his shoulder.

“Good day, Cadet.”

“Sir,” she replies and stands there watching his steady, measured strides as he walks away.

She’s moving before she quite knows what she’s doing.

“Sir, Commander,” she calls, half jogging to catch up to him. “Sir, I also apologize for the way in which I said all that. It was inappropriate and I’ll try to restrain such emotional outbursts in the future.”

He tucks his hands behind his back, his eyes narrowing slightly as he watches her.

“Cadet, as you continue your education you will find that tone and the interpretation thereof varies considerably from culture to culture and species to species.”

“No, I know, but-“

“I am not certain you do.” He pauses, then, and she watches his focus draw inward, like he’s processing something. “Ah. I apologize for interrupting.”

She nods, unsure of what to say, her mind circling around his comment, the conversation and him inexplicably standing there in front of her, despite the fact she was quite sure they’d never speak again.

“So you’re saying then that how I said what I said wasn’t particularly offensive to you?”

“Only in the sense that I have been trained to recognize the signs of insubordination in humans,” he says and she feels her face grow hot. “It is no matter, Cadet, do not trouble yourself.”

“You’re still a senior officer.”

He nods in acknowledgement, and then just waits there, studying her again. It reminds her of all those hours in his class, back before all this got so messy between them, when he was just her professor and he would have that same look on his face, bland but something about it edging towards expectant. More often than not he would just wait until the cadet under his scrutiny either stammered out a question as to what the Commander was waiting for, or they made whatever intuitive – logical, probably – leap he assumed they were capable of.

Now, already thrown by his presence, it takes her a long time to figure out what that might be.

“You never wanted to be rude,” she says, her earlier embarrassment coming back tenfold. “A cultural misinterpretation on my part, based upon your own tone and word choice.”

“That is correct, Cadet,” he says in that unhurried manner he would often take from behind his lectern when he was gearing up for a long dialogue with a student. “I did not intend to cause offense. However, it was incumbent upon me – much as it is for you whenever working with an individual with different cultural practices – to better consider and respect how you would… feel in those circumstances and act accordingly. Again, I apologize for the lapse in consideration.”

“I’m sorry, too. I really, really, never meant to stereotype you as rude. I- I apologize, sir.” 

He’s quiet for long enough that she doesn’t think he’s going to say anything else, so she’s on the verge of thanking him again for the articles and saying goodbye when he finally speaks.

“I admit to a certain confusion, which perhaps you will be amenable to explaining.” He waits until she nods before continuing. “When you were my student, you seemed particularly receptive to feedback on your work and yet over the course of this project there was a discernable difference in your acceptance of such.”

She feels too laid bare in front of him, too vulnerable from their conversation, and too discomposed after finding him outside her dorm, so she has to bite back her first reaction of defensiveness and the urge to deny that’s what she was doing. 

She looks away from him for a long moment, chewing on the inside of her cheek and studying the empty lawn outside her dorm that’s normally full of cadets.

“I wanted to do my paper the way I wanted to do it and you weren’t my advisor from the beginning and I designed the whole thing with Doctor Carrick, not with you, and… And then all of this, with the Ambassador and everything.”

“And everything?” he echoes, the words sounding vague and imprecise and ill matched to his careful enunciation.

“Yeah, it’s – it was ridiculous, I know, but-“

“Why did you not simply say that?” he cuts in and she feels that familiar heat flare in her chest.

“Because you don’t listen,” she snaps and then takes a deep breath, forcing herself to relax her grip on the padds she’s suddenly tightly clutching. “I’m sorry, sir, but you don’t exactly welcome feedback like that.”

“That is incorrect. It is illogical to avoid criticism if it could help one improve.”

“Then stop interrupting me,” she says, harsher than she would have liked. “And try to create some sense that if I actually say something like that you won’t turn around and make me feel stupid, or illogical, or like an idiot, or whatever.”

“I do not think you are unintelligent, and furthermore as I am facing you there is no need to turn.”

Nyota presses her lips together and stares at the sky for a long moment before she feels calm enough to respond to him.

“You teach in xenoling.”

“Xenolinguistics, yes. As you are aware, from having recently been my student.”

Talking to this man is quite possibly the most infuriating thing she’s ever done since starting the Academy and that’s counting every interaction she’s had with Kirk, who’s starting to look like a perfectly reasonable gentleman compared to Commander Spock.

“As you know, one of the hallmarks of the discipline, and one of the things that’s hammered home – uh, reinforced – during our training is the way in which differences in culture, language use, and customs shouldn’t be a cause for amusement, indignation, or annoyance.”

“I should have thought that would be clear to you, as you have completed your second year of schooling.”

“It is clear,” she says stiffly, her mind racing to try to control the ire he sparks in her. Getting angry – angrier – won’t help. “And I understand the point you made that I shouldn’t misinterpret your words based on how you say them. But, it is very, very difficult for me – for humans in general, probably, but I won’t generalize since I don’t know your coworkers very well – to feel comfortable working with you or talking to you when you act like that. I understand that when you translate Vulcan to Standard the phrasing is harsher and more abrupt than native Standard speakers tend to use, and your language lacks the colloquialisms and informal speech patterns that we use to express comfort or familiarity with another, but you have to understand the way you come across. And it frankly hurts our – my – feelings to constantly be treated like I’m a step behind.” She holds up her hand when he goes to speak and it takes him a moment, but he finally closes his mouth again. “Let me guess. You could construct a very logical argument right now that my feelings are my own to deal with and as a native Terran and native Standard speaker I should make concessions to off worlders, minority species, and those who are otherwise marginalized by the dominant, human culture of Starfleet.”

“As I said, Cadet, I do not consider you unintelligent.”

“Thanks, I think. And trust me, I completely agree with that and am willing to abide by that. But that doesn’t mean that if I misinterpret the way in which you say something or find you rude that my feelings are immediately invalid. Maybe I shouldn’t feel like that, but I still do. And being embarrassed and uncomfortable makes it hard to take your feedback and hard to work with you on a project.”

He just studies her for a long time, his expression completely blank, before he tips his head to the side and draws in a breath.

“That is an unfamiliar concept to me.”

“Well, you learn new things every day.”

“Indeed.”

“And, um, speaking of that…” she starts, wanting to chew on her lip again as she considers whether or not to ask her question. “Do you, uh, know what it means to turn around and do or say something?”

His eyebrows draw together. “You are suggesting that I do not.”

“It’s an expressionthat suggests a complete reversal of an opinion, or something that comes off as abrupt or unexpected. When the phrase is used like that it’s not a physical action.”

“I see. Thank you for your explanation.”

“It’s no problem. I’m still sometimes shocked that we chose Standard as our, well, standardized language when it’s anything but easy to learn.”

“I grew up speaking it.”

“Oh.” She feels herself flush, chagrined by her assumption that he didn’t, based upon his Vulcan diction and careful elocution. “Yeah, I guess it makes since it would be taught in school, since it’s the Federation’s primary-“

“I learned it outside of my schooling,” he says abruptly and then stills, his head tipped to the side. “I should not have interrupted you.”

“It’s fine,” she says, trying to resist the urge to ask him where exactly he learned to speak it if not in school, and what type of environment he was in if that particular phrase was unfamiliar to him. A non-native speaker or regional differences from whoever taught him, maybe, or even an inclination towards teaching the language in a Vulcan way, where you might intentionally leave out idioms and jargon so that when its spoken it still keeps within the language traditions of the dominant culture. Or even someone who lived on Vulcan for so long that abandoning the quirks of Standard became second nature. 

She realizes, abruptly, that she’s just been staring at him and flushes again, focusing instead on a tree over his shoulder, the even green grass of the lawn, then down at the padds in her hand to avoid looking at him again.

“Thanks for these,” she finally says, hugging the padds to her stomach and crossing hands over them.

“You already thanked me.” Something around his eyes narrows, even though she swears nothing in his expression actually changed. “That comment is the type of which you do not appreciate.”

“Yes. I get it, it’s probably weird for you to hear me repeat myself like that, but it sometimes reiteration helps make a point.” And helps fill awkward silences with former professors and former fake boyfriends, she doesn’t add.

“Curious. I had assumed that particular human tendency was due to faulty memory.”

She feels that familiar spark of indignation again, but he actually does sound curious, as if she just explained something about humans he had no clue about, so instead of getting mad at him she finds herself huffing out a small laugh.

“Faulty memory? Really?”

“Is that amusing?”

“No. Yes.”

“Which is it?”

“Both.”

“Both?”

“Both,” she confirms, matching the solemnity of his tone.

He does that thing again where he just looks at her for longer than a human would, before he nods at the padds in her hands and glances from them back up to meet her eyes again.

“As we did not finish our most recent meeting, I would be amenable to providing assistance so that you can conclude the current vein of research you are conducting.”

“But we’re not-“ she says, waving vaguely between them. “Anymore. I thought we decided that it was a pretty terrible idea.”

“My offer for one more meeting is not contingent upon our previous arrangement. I remain your faculty advisor and if you do not wish to continue your project, I would at the very least wish to leave your paper in a state that it can be easily resumed with another professor.”

“Ok.” She looks down at the padds she’s still holding, then up at her dorm. Gaila’s probably going to kill her, or at least bring the tentacle guy back, but the Commander’s right that meeting just once more would be helpful. Really helpful, actually, and it would be a good point from which to start this project again in the fall. And maybe it’s one more chance to clear the air between them. He’s not interrupting her or correcting her every other sentence she speaks, and her urge to throttle him has largely died down. Maybe not completely, but she at least currently doesn’t want to yell at him, and that’s something. “Let me read these first.”

“You have my contact information when you are ready.”

“I do.” 

“Very well. Have a pleasant afternoon, Cadet.”

“Bye, sir.”

He gives her one last inscrutable look and it’s not until she’s watched him turn past a building and out of sight that she moves to go inside.


	6. Chapter 6

They plan to meet in his office, but she gets a call from him that morning that due to renovations, the entire building is closed until further notice.

“The maintenance director did not sufficiently communicate the disruption,” he says, his voice curt and she wonders at the note of irritation that underlies his words.

“Somewhere else then,” she says, shifting her comm to her other hand and turning her shoulder so that she can avoid Gaila’s open mouthed stare. “Tea, again?”

“Very well.”

In the moment where there used to be the click of a disconnected call, leaving her comm abruptly, stonily silent in her hand, instead she hears the faint sound of him taking a breath.

“Bye,” she offers.

“Goodbye, Cadet.”

It’s way too stiff and formal and threatens to make her smile, an urge that quickly dies when she looks up to find Gaila still staring at her.

“What?” Nyota asks, tossing her comm on her bed with studied nonchalance. “It’s just one more meeting. He said he felt bad that we didn’t get to finish our last conversation. Or, rather, that it’s logical to finish the thread of research we started, or whatever.”

“Oh.”

“You seem surprised.”

Gaila mutely nods, her mouth closing with a click.

“Anything you want to say about it?”

“I… no,” Gaila says slowly and Nyota doesn’t know whether her roommate looks more shocked at not having a comment or the fact that Nyota is seeing the Commander again.

…

Instead of worrying about what to wear, she throws on her jeans, and instead of worrying about checking her messages a half dozen times, she checks them once, finds nothing important, and ignores her inbox for the rest of the morning.

She finds him waiting for her with tea in front of him, his padds neatly arranged on the table they usually sit at, and instead of rushing over to him to make sure she’s not wasting his time, she gets herself a mug of chai and when she’s settled across from him, pulls out the padds he lent her and pushes one of them to the side of the table.

“This one wasn’t helpful. It was interesting, so thanks for finding it, but I’m not sure how you thought it would relate to my topic.”

“I had thought that perhaps you would consider including mention of Rousseau’s theory of xenocultural relativity.”

“I’d rather keep my paper more focused instead of bringing in too many theoretical frameworks.”

He nods, the motion less abrupt than it might have been.

“Very well.”

“I was actually wondering if you could send me the access codes to the database of those longitudinal studies of non-Terrans who take Standard as a Second Language. I can find other resources, but having the raw SSL data would be helpful so that I can run a regression analysis comparing test scores to star system of origin for each participant,” she continues, quickly falling into the easy rhythm of their earlier conversations about her work.

“Logical,” he states, raising his tea to take a sip. 

“I know we don’t have those same type of resources for Romulan and Klingon since we don’t have any native speakers of those enrolled here, but I’d still like to include them if I can. I’m fine if I have to drop my research into Klingon, but I’m pretty sure that my Romulan is strong enough on it’s own that I should be fine there. If we have any information of other Federation citizens learning Romulan, or Romulans learning Standard, I’d love to know about it.”

He sets down his mug carefully, his fingers still wrapped around the handle. “You speak Romulan?”

“I’m not proficient every dialect. High Romulan is so rarely broadcasted into Federation space that while I can speak and understand it I wouldn’t call myself fluent. But with the two more informal dialects I’ve been able to amass enough recordings that yes, I feel confident in it.”

Something shifts in his face that might be a frown. “There are no archives of Romulan, nor classes in it at the Academy.”

“I just did it on my own,” she explains, which she thinks should have been clear to him as he just pointed out that Starfleet didn’t have the necessary materials. 

“You taught yourself Romulan?”

“Yes.” She drums her fingers on the table, then makes herself stop and wraps her hands around her cup, the heat seeping into her skin. “It should really be taught at the Academy.”

“A political choice.”

“Oh. Really? Why?”

He opens his mouth to answer and she watches the way his head tips slightly, his mouth closing again as he focuses his gaze on the table between them.

“I am not certain.”

“It doesn’t make sense to send out Federation vessels with such little support for the language, when we know the entire Romulan Empire is out there. And especially with such tension over the last few decades… I guess I never thought of the Academy’s curriculum as being a political grounds.” She sips at her tea before placing it back on the table. “That can’t be logical, can it?”

He pauses again before giving a slight shake of his head. “No.”

“Well, either way, it’s helpful to know and easy enough to learn since I was already fluent in Vulcan.”

“May I ask how many languages you speak, Cadet?”

When she tells him, he replaces his mug, already halfway to his mouth, on the table without drinking from it.

“And for your proficiency with Romulan, where you found these recordings?”

“The long range sensor lab. I just download them when I find them, and it’s never more than bits and pieces, really, but I can generally string them together.” She pauses, then adds quickly, “I don’t do it during my shift there, sir, I take them home and do it afterwards. And that’s within regs, I checked the security clearances for that lab.”

“You taught yourself Romulan from clips of old transmissions that you picked up while simultaneously performing your duties in the long range sensor lab,” the Commander says slowly.

“Well, it took a while. I had to differentiate between them and other sonic subspace anomalies, then gather enough of them to begin to make sense of what I was listening to, but yes.” He’s just looking at her, his fingers wrapped around the handle of his mug like he was about to pick it up again and then forgot to do so. “Is there a problem, sir?”

“Not at all,” he says, taking a quick sip of his tea. “Perhaps, if you have time over the summer you could amalgamate your resources into a format that would allow access for others who are interested in learning the language. Starfleet might be reticent to adopt it as a course offered at the Academy, but you are correct that it is logical that communications officer be well versed in it.”

“Well, ok,” she says. She has plenty of time and no matter how much fun she has with Gaila, she’s already itching for actual work. She knows the strain and exhaustion of the semester is looming at the end of the summer, but she came to Starfleet to have a successful career and at least this is an opportunity to do that. “But surely the VSA has a tutorial program. Otherwise how did you learn it?”

He carefully sets his mug back down, spinning it so that the handle is parallel with the edge of the table. “I do not speak Romulan.”

“Oh.”

“Let us return to the topic of your paper,” he says and she doesn’t think she’s imagining how quickly he chances the subject. “I have a number of final comments on your work.”

He calls up what she recognizes as her outline, now with dozens of neat, red notations near nearly every paragraph.

“It looks like it’s bleeding.”

He draws back from it slightly, studying it.

“No, it does not. There is no fluid, nor-”

“Never mind,” she says, holding out her hand to take it from him.

She loses herself in his notes, discussions of Romulan largely forgotten as she peruses his comments and annotations. She looks up once to find him watching her, but he immediately drops his gaze and takes another sip of his tea, so she doesn’t think about it again, that peculiar, rapt attention of his.

…

“Just some work,” she tells Gaila. “Like a couple hours.”

Gaila frowns.

“Ok, two hours. Just two hours.”

Gaila puts her hands on her hips.

“One hour. One really quick hour.”

Gaila scowls and Nyota sighs.

“One hour and then I’m all yours, I swear, ok?” She backs out of their room, then sticks her head back in to say, “Plus the time to walk there!”

“Just go!” she hears from her irate roommate.

An hour doesn’t give her much time to go through the recordings she has on Romulan, but at least she can focus better in the library than she ever could in her room. Gaila is, in general, a great roommate but she’s always rustling something, opening drawers too loudly, tapping her stylus, or humming, and Nyota likes the peace and silence of the library, the heavy quiet that seems to permeate its very walls.

And now, it’s even quieter than normal. In stark contrast to the bustle of finals week, her footsteps echo dully along the empty hallway. It’s eerie, almost, to go from the constant shuffling of cadet’s filmplasts and padds, and the scent of coffee and other species appropriate stimulants that hung heavy in the air despite a strict no beverages policy, to being the only one there.

It’s no surprise, then, how high she jumps when Doctor Puri emerges from behind a shelving unit full of padds.

“Sorry!” he whispers, overly loud and harsh in the stillness. Both antennae are sticking straight up from his crown of white hair, nearly shivering in shock, and his normally light blue skin has darkened to navy.

Nyota lets out a startled breath, her hand on her chest and they both look at each other and then laugh at the same time.

“You scared me,” she says, dropping her hand and wiping her suddenly sweating palm on her skirt. “I thought I was alone in here.”

“I thought I was too!” 

“I wouldn’t have imagined that anyone else would be here,” she says as adrenaline drains out of her and leaves her slightly shaky in its wake.

“I would say the same thing, except that I shouldn’t be surprised that the woman Spock is seeing would spend her summer in a library of all places.”

“I, ah-“ she starts. “It’s really not-“

“Something you want to talk about?” he asks. “Because I tried to ply Spock for information – my wife is dying to know about this, let me tell you – but you know him, it’s like talking to a wall sometimes, especially when he’s made up his mind about staying quiet.”

“I’m sure that’s the case,” she says, frantic for a reply to fill the silence after his comment.

“Well, I’ll have to tell Arlene that I struck out again,” he says, one antenna bobbing up and down in what Nyota has to guess is a shrug.

That gesture, and his comment stirs something that nags at her and she’s aware of studying him for a long moment, the quiet stretching between them.

“Sir, may I ask… well, it’s just that you’re quite familiar with Terran phrases and expressions and I don’t mean to be presumptuous but…”

“I was raised in San Francisco,” he answers to her unspoken question. “Just a few blocks away from here, actually. And Tellar Prime, and Fomalhaut II for a couple years, Theta Maenali V for a bit, and then on Vulcan – though I didn’t know Spock when I lived there – and finally Sigma Phoenicis VII, where my parents still live. Needless to say, after moving around so much, some things stuck. And, as it turns out, spurred an interest in xenomedicine.”

He gestures to the padd he’s holding and she recognizes one of the medical texts she’s seen McCoy with numerous times.

“Wow, that’s… that sounds really interesting, sir.”

“It was. You and Spock should come over for dinner some night and I’ll tell you all about my quest to find air conditioning on Vulcan.”

She can’t help but grin. 

“Was it successful?”

“I’ll leave you in suspense until you come to dinner,” he answers and she feels her smile widen as his antennae twitch with the Andorian sign of amusement.

Her grin fades again as she actually considers his offer.

“That’s very generous, but…” she trails off, shaking her head. “We’re not… it’s complicated.”

“He’s a complicated man, but one of the best,” Puri says with a smile that’s so fond it softens something inside Nyota’s chest. “I’ll get in touch with him and let him know you’re dying to sample some Andorian cuisine. We’ll even cook the meat for you. And enjoy your work, Uhura, it’s pretty pleasant to not be with masses of cadets in here.”

It is pleasant, but just as much because of the amused buzz their conversation leaves her with as the solitude and peace of the library.

She’s deep into a list of Romulan verbs, her mind is churning over how interesting Doctor Puri is, and relishing the silence when a tap of boot steps interrupts her perusal of her padd. She manages not to jump this time, neither at the sound nor the sight of the Commander walking towards her with his hands tucked behind his back.

“I was just looking through some of my material on Romulan,” she explains as he draws near to the table she’s chosen, one of the big ones next to a window she rarely can find a seat at during the semester.

He stops two long strides from where she’s sitting and drops his gaze down to her padd. “Excellent.” The silence of the building is peculiar, almost oppressive without the rustle of other cadets searching the stacks or tapping away at their padds, or the clicking of comms as they send and receive texts. “I encountered Doctor Puri and he said you were here.”

“Yeah I just talked to him,” she says and then that same silence falls again.

She just watches him, tall and stiff in his instructor blacks, his eyes darting across her face and down to her padd again before he meets her gaze once more.

“May I join you?” he finally asks.

“Yes, sir,” she answers and only then does he unclasp his hands from behind his back and pull out the chair across from her.

He motions to her padd and she lets him slide it towards him. 

“You have compiled a considerable amount of work.”

“I just started, really.” She looks down at her padd, then back up at him to find him watching her. “I’ve been thinking about how to best organize what I have and I’ve never created an instruction module in a language before, so it’s taking a while.”

“If you would like, I will review what you done so far and provide feedback based upon my experience teaching various language courses.”

She had half forgotten that he taught language tutorials, only having had him for Advanced Morphology. His suggestion brings to mind the Commander Spock of the past semester, quiet and formidable, but nonetheless helpful and more or less accessible, and she finds herself nodding.

“Thank you, that’d be great.”

“This type of programming is typically not taught to communication track cadets until fourth year.”

“Looking forward to it.” She grimaces down at the padd and when she looks up again, he’s watching her with that crease between his brows that she seems to draw out of him more often than not and his head tipped to the side. “I meant that I’m not.”

“Not what?”

“Not looking forward to it.”

His gaze narrows slightly before he returns his attention to the padd, scrolling through it quickly once more.

“Does this contain all three dialects?”

“Yes. Uh, sorry, sir, I just meant that I find computer programming daunting and it’ll be a challenge for me when I take those courses.”

“Why did you not simply say that?”

“I…” She swallows and tamps down the ghost of irritation his brusque question stirs in her. “That was just another way of articulating that.”

“It obfuscated the meaning of your statement.”

She nods slowly. Gaila’s introduction to sarcasm had been to spend several months declaring in a long drawl how much she loved the way in which it conveyed the opposite meaning. Once she got over what she called a ‘human tendency to just assume we all know what you mean when you won’t just say it’ she proved herself adept at using it. Too adept, really, and Nyota had more than once wished she had never introduced the concept.

“I’m sorry.”

“It is no matter.”

It is, obviously, or he wouldn’t have said anything and she starts to apologize again, but then thinks better of it, unsure if he wouldn’t find that equally as confusing. Instead she reminds herself, not for the first time, how awkward and out of place and probably illogical she would seem and feel if she was living on Vulcan and even if she had been there for years, how little she might understand a culture so vastly different from her own.

“It’s not the most accessible rhetorical device,” she finally says. “Especially not compared to the literal humor of Cardassian – which I’ve never understood but at least you can tell when they’re joking – or the way that Trill and Tellarite each have such distinct tonal modulations for conveying different emotional effects.”

He glances up at her, his eyes dark and sharp beneath those upswept brows.

“I have a request,” he says abruptly, then pauses and looks at her padd again. “I did not ask if I am interrupting you, which it appears I am, nor if this is an appropriate time to speak with you.”

He’s sitting stiffly and it doesn’t look like his back is even touching the back of his chair. She wonders if he always sits like that, inches between his body and anything that might look like he was relaxing against it, and if so why she never noticed that before.

“It’s fine.”

He still hesitates for a long moment before speaking, like he’s waiting to see if she’s going to retract her willingness to have him there.

“Very few of my acquaintances are inclined to be candid or honest with me,” he starts and she nearly snorts in amusement, looking at his severe expression and achingly formal demeanor. “As first officer of the Enterprise I am tasked with overseeing the entire crew and while that specifically includes the bridge officers and sciences staff, it remains a daunting task to undertake.”

“Ok,” she says slowly, unsure of where he’s going with this.

“As you are well aware, the majority of Starfleet officers are human and Terran culture is often the predominant one onboard a ship. While this is less consequential while on duty due to Starfleet protocols that take into account a variety of cultural and interspecies compromises-“ he hesitates then and damn if he doesn’t sound a bit like he’s babbling.

“Sir?”

“Your level of frankness, honesty, and forthrightness is quite rare. I wondered if I may ask for your assistance on a number of interpersonal questions I have in regards to some of my crewmates.”

“Ah.” She looks at him for a long moment, taking in the way he’s still holding himself like he could bolt out of there any moment at the slightest provocation. She’s a little shocked by his question and a lot curious. “I guess I can try, but I’m not certain exactly how much help I would be.”

She’s pretty sure that Starfleet has resources for that type of thing, though now that she thinks about it, Gaila has texted her in the middle of more than one class, or called her in the middle of the night for an explanation of baffling human behavior, like why a guy she was seeing thought it was appropriate to keep a feline in his apartment when it was clearly a barely domesticated wild animal, or the time a woman Gaila had met refused to have sex until Gaila took her socks off, which Nyota had eventually been forced to agree didn’t actually interfere with the activities in question but still it was just… weird.

She just really, really hopes that none of the Commander’s questions are along the vein of Gaila’s. Cats, maybe ok. Standard sexual practices, no. Not him, not ever. If Vulcans truly don’t date, the Commander can continue enjoying whatever type of monasterial life he’s been logically pursuing so far.

Or not pursuing. Maybe dating is off the table but that doesn’t necessarily meant that-

“I am mostly interested in understanding time spent out of work with colleagues,” he says like he can guess she’s quietly freaking out about whether or not he wants sex advice. 

“Right. Great. So what, specifically, is the issue?”

“I have long avoided associating with humans outside of the bounds necessitated by my position,” he starts.

“So you haven’t you ever had a close relationship with a human?”

“No.”

She nods slowly, considering the degree of isolation he must have endured to have that answer after four years at the Academy, plus however many years as a commissioned officer after he graduated. She wants to ask about that, but doesn’t think she should exactly phrase it like that, not if she doesn’t want him to dash out of there like he half looks like he wants to.

“Ok,” she nods. “So you’re fine working with humans, or fine enough, at least, but when you’re not at work, we’re… confusing? Baffling? Illogical?”

One eyebrow twitches. “Yes.”

“And?” she prods.

“Many of the bridge officers, and more often Captain Pike, have repeatedly offered to engage me in social activities. As my earlier experience with you has shown, I do not possess the social skills nor the propensity to obtain them in order to successfully interact with humans in a social capacity.”

“What types of things does he want to do with you? Mini-golf?”

“A diminutive form of golf?”

“It’s…” she starts, then shakes her head. “Never mind. Are you’re worried it’s going to effect your position on the ship?” 

“I am not worried,” he says stiffly, visibly retreating inside himself until he’s as austere and stern as ever.

“Sure.”

“I am not, I simply wish to understand why humans seek to spend social time with work colleagues,” he says and she can’t help but think there’s something in that bland tone that sounds a bit petulant. “It is logical to seek help when one does not understand a situation and that is why I am speaking of this to you.”

He sounds as if he wishes that he could for once abandon logic and avoid this conversation all together, which she would be fine with since she’s not exactly qualified to do more than guess. She contemplates telling him to go find a commissioned officer to get advice from. But then again, he sought her out specifically and he’s willing to help her with her work on Romulan, so she gives it a try. 

“Well, it’s not like it’s universal, plenty of people leave work and don’t see each other afterwards. But on a ship?” She raises one shoulder towards her ear. “You’re Pike’s first officer.”

“I am aware.”

“No, well, yes, but, isn’t there a certain need for you two to get along? Establish a rapport? Bond with each other? He probably doesn’t feel like he knows you as well as he’d like to and that whatever you two do while you’re at work isn’t enough.”

“He is aware that Vulcans do not consume alcohol and yet repeatedly asks me if I would wish to do so.”

“I didn’t say that he was good at trying to become friends with you. Have you suggested anything that you might want to do?”

“No.”

“Do you actually want to spend time with him?”

“No.”

“Do you dislike him?”

“No.”

“What, uh, is the problem then?”

“I have a sufficiently constructive professional relationship with him and do not desire to spend my personal time in his company.”

“Well…” she starts and bites back a sigh. “I’m not sure exactly what you want me to help you with, then.”

“What would be the best way in which to convey that?”

“That you don’t want to see him outside work?”

“Yes.”

“Um.” Nyota purses her lips, staring at the Commander. “Do you, uh, have the option to say that, sir?”

“The availability of my personal time was not listed in the job description.”

“Sure, but… I think it’s pretty commonly understood that socialization comes with the position.”

He blinks and she presses her lips together, wanting to kick herself. Not commonly understood, then, and that was an assumption that she might not have wanted to make. ‘Don’t speculate about what someone from another culture or species might know or not know’ is drilled into them in their comms training, and it’s something Nyota finds she has to remind herself of when it comes to the Commander, which is made even more difficult with the amount of time he’s spent on Earth and in the company of humans.

“I was unaware.”

“I think – I mean I don’t know, but I assume – that a lot of senior staff have personal relationships and Starfleet has the assumption that this is a necessary factor for ship wide cohesion and positive working relationships,” she says slowly.

“Why do humans believe that time spent socializing will increase professional effectiveness?”

“Because it does. Or it can, at least.” He just watches her blandly and she shrugs again. “I don’t have any empirical studies, sir, but you could probably find them if you looked. But I guess it’s kind of a foreign concept for you.”

“Yes.”

“And perhaps unarticulated as of yet.”

“That is so.” His brows draw together as he studies the table. “If my performance is exemplary, why does it matter how I spend my time outside of work?”

“But it’s logical, right? I mean, for humans, not for Vulcans. How we interact with each other has repercussions for our work. We can put aside personal differences when we need to – or try,” she says with a wry grin at him. “But we work together better when we know more about each other.”

“Friendship is a requirement for admirable performance?”

“No. Yes. Affinity and understanding is maybe a better way to put it. You don’t have to be best friends. But also, Pike probably wants to see some effort on your part and might view your reticence to get to know him as something that could carry over to your interactions with the rest of the crew.”

“My duties in respect to the crew pertain to their schedules, performance evaluations, and the supervision of the ship’s research.”

“And interpersonal disputes?”

“Yes.”

“So you need to be accessible to them, then. Someone they can talk to.”

“I am aware.”

“And that means cultivating that rapport and for humans that means personal time. Chatting over lunch, grabbing a cup of coffee, getting a drink after work. That kind of relationship isn’t simply fostered through reviewing data sets and compiling reports. Or, it can be, but you’re… you… you don’t always come across as the most accessible for issues outside of work,” she says with a grimace which she tries to wipe from her face as quickly as she can, but he’s not looking at her so she doesn’t think he notices. 

“I do not understand why humans need to establish such a relationship in order to discuss such issues with me.”

“Is it that you don’t understand or that you don’t agree?” she asks and he opens his mouth to answer before narrowing his eyes and snapping his mouth shut again. “The second one?”

“If that was a requirement of the position he should have either stated that or should not have hired me,” he says severely and she thinks that probably only a Vulcan would be able to distance himself from such a prestigious position as first officer of the flagship if the parameters of the job weren’t what he specifically and precisely expected. Or if those parameters were so completely and utterly baffling in the face of his own culture, where the notion of needing successful interpersonal relationships probably never entered the workplace, and why would they when everything was based not on emotion, but on logic. 

She taps her stylus against her mouth, studying him for a long moment and thinking about how this would probably be a great case study for Interspecies Ethics – which she’s pretty sure he teaches – with Pike’s assumption that by taking the job the Commander knew he had to demonstrate some amount of willingness to be personally accessible and the Commander’s inability to grasp exactly what humans need in order to feel comfortable around him. 

Starfleet at its best, she thinks, with everyone fumbling along as they figure out how to work together.

“Look, isn’t it great that he wanted you for that position? Rather than have two humans in charge of such a large crew? He’s pretty much proving his own ineptitude in understanding interspecies relationships by inviting you out for a drink… and frankly, sir, you’re proving your own reticence to work with humans by refusing.” She shrugs and gives him a small grin. “Listen, I get called stubborn all the time, so I know what it’s like, but maybe bring this up with him? And in the meantime, isn’t it logical to perform your duties to the best of your abilities, even if you don’t agree with them?” 

He just stares at her stonily and she watches him in return until he blinks and looks away. 

“Yes.”

“I get it, you don’t want to change. You want to act like yourself – like a Vulcan – and have people accept and respect that. And you haven’t found that here, except maybe in Puri, and instead you’re asked to capitulate and you don’t want to have to make that compromise.”

“You are not unperceptive.”

“Not unperceptive and not unintelligent. Thanks, Commander.”

“You are welcome,” he says, so seriously that it threatens to make her smile, even though something in her chest is hurting for him.

She presses her lips together. “I’m sorry.”

“You have taken no action that warrants an apology.”

“No, I meant… “ she starts, tapping her stylus on the edge of the table before realizing how annoying that is and putting it down. “So, uh, any big bonding opportunities with the crew coming up?”

He drops his gaze to examine the table.

“The Captain asked me to join him, a number of our colleagues, and the Ambassador for dinner and I declined. I believe, based upon his tone and his body language, he was displeased.”

“You get a lot of dinner invitations,” she tells him and he glances up at her again.

“I am not certain as to the average-“

“It was a joke. Sarcasm, actually, to be specific. Sorry. Again.”

“I do not always understand the specifics of human humor.”

“That’s ok, it can be complicated,” Nyota says, her mind full of times Gaila has not quite managed to get, or make a joke. “I just meant that Puri and the Captain both would like to have dinner with you. Oh, that’s right, I don’t think I told you that, Puri wanted us to come over.”

“He mentioned that to me as well when I saw him outside,” he says and then doesn’t add anything else, so she doesn’t try to come up with a reply, either. Instead, she fiddles with her stylus and listens to the heavy silence of the library.

“When’s the dinner with Pike?” she finally asks when it’s clear that they’re not going to talk about Puri’s invitation. 

“Next Saturday.”

“So is it not logical that you attend?” she asks and then immediately wishes she hadn’t, not with the way two spots of green appear on his cheeks again and something in his expression darkens. She wonders at that, the rigidity of logic interacting with whatever so clearly simmers under that control of his, creeping through now and then and apparently informing some amount of the choices he’s making, even if he’s loath to admit it. She’s certain that if she asks, he would have some reason for not going to the dinner, one which is well thought out and backed with enough reasoning that it can only be logical that he skip it.

In the time it takes her to start to formulate something to say to how stonily he’s sitting after her comment, he’s powered down the screen on her padd, risen, pushed his chair in, and tucked her padd under his arm.

“Good day, Cadet,” he says. “Thank you for your assistance.”

She just nods and starts gathering up her own things to go meet Gaila. He begins to walk away, then hesitates, and then just stands there and waits for her to finish packing up, which is a little strange but she’s getting rather used to his peculiar mannerisms.

It’s not until they’re outside that she looks up at him and voices the thought that’s been on her mind since they left her table.

“You don’t have to help me with this,” she says, gesturing to the padd he’s holding. 

“And yet you provided me assistance today.”

“Yeah, but…” She licks her lips, then bites the inside of her cheek. She didn’t really give him any help, just probably confirmed to him that he doesn’t really have a choice in socializing with his colleagues if he wants to succeed in his position. “I just don’t really understand the change of heart, sir.”

“As I said, Cadet, very few are willing to be so honest with me.”

“Oh.” She squints out across the lawn in front of the library at a sole cadet walking across the grass, a contrast of reds and greens in the summer sunlight. 

She glances down at his hands, then, and to her surprise, sees them white knuckled and tense.

He sees her looking and folds his hands behind his back, gripping the padd awkwardly to do so.

“I’ll, uh, see you later, then,” she says, wanting to look at the clear tension in his hands again but also not wanting to pry. Or, if she’s honest with herself, very much wanting to pry but not thinking that she should.

“Cadet,” he says but it doesn’t sound like he’s reminding himself to bid goodbye to her, more like he’s about to say something and can’t quite get it out without one of his long hesitations. She waits for whatever it is, staring out across the quad with him, both of their focus on a bird that’s landed on the grass and is pecking around. “I was dishonest before when you asked if I had ever had a close relationship with a human. My mother is human.”

She jerks her gaze from the bird to stare at him again, at the way his hands are still tight around each other and the slight jump in his jaw.

She tries to take all that in, trying to fit those new facts about him around what she knows of him and what she’s come to know over their short acquaintance this summer, but he’s so stiff and wooden that he seems anything but half-human in that moment.

Or maybe not. Under those pointed ears and slanted brows, and the height, lean build, and fluid grace his species is known for, there’s an edge of emotion that he seems dangerously near. Maybe a full Vulcan would have been able to say that with complete equanimity and wouldn’t be scrutinizing a bird in order to avoid looking at her, and maybe a full Vulcan would have been able to finish their conversation instead of abruptly ending it.

“I apologize,” he says stiffly and she wonders if the apology is for his earlier falsehood, or if he isn’t asking for her pardon for his human heritage.

“We were talking specifically about friendships,” she says quickly, suddenly feeling the urge to reassure him. “Not family relationships, so what you said was hardly dishonest.”

He nods and she’s watching him so closely, suddenly captivated by the fact he’s actually half human, that she notices the way something in his shoulders ease.

“I see.” He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else and then closes it again.

“Well, thanks again for taking a look at all those materials on Romulan,” she says, thinking he might like nothing better than to get away from her right then. What she really wants to do is quiz him about his mother and why he doesn’t just ask her all these questions, and what type of relationship with her he has, and what his upbringing was like, and so many other things that have led him to be so clearly uncomfortable in the company of humans, but she doesn’t want to push.

“Of course.” He looks for a moment like he’s going to speak again, and this time he does. “If you would like to continue discussing your paper, Cadet, I would be amenable. You were correct when you first approached me this summer that it is logical to cultivate talent among cadets who have the makings of excellent officers.”

“Aren’t you busy? With the Ambassador?”

“I have found that she alternates between not answering my communications and wasting my time. Currently, we are in the former phase, so I find myself quite at my leisure.”

“She’s kind of… well, with all due respect, she’s kind of a pain.”

“If I was permitted by my culture or my duties to agree with that sentiment, it is likely that I would.” She’s so confused as to whether or not he meant that to be funny, and therefore is caught between smiling and staring at him, that she’s still processing his statement when he speaks again. “There is no other trade necessary on your end. Logic is enough.”

“Still,” she says. She digs at the ground with her toe. Logic might be enough for him, but it hardly is for her. “That dinner is at the end of next week?” 

“That is what I said.”

Leave it alone, she tells herself. Tell him goodbye, set a time to meet up later, let him go his way and let Gaila be thrilled with a girl’s night next Saturday.

But thinking of Gaila just reminds Nyota of the dozens of times her roommate, as gregarious as she is, has found herself on the edge of a gathering of humans as everyone laughs about some pop culture reference, or frustrated by her ability to connect with some of their classmates when she can’t always understand what’s going on, and even now, years after they started at the Academy, the nights Gaila sometimes spends in their room watching a movie, a bit too quiet and withdrawn to be anything but homesick and lonely.

And whatever having a human mother on Vulcan was like for the Commander, it obviously didn’t engender a complete comfort with human customs. She doesn’t know what that means for him, since he certainly wouldn’t be the first person she met who willfully disregarded their parents teachings, nor does having human genetics and exposure to some amount of Terran norms during his upbringing mean an automatic familiarity with Earth, even with how long he’s served in Starfleet. 

A professional dinner with a boss and colleagues, not to mention a visiting dignitary, isn’t exactly the simplest of social situations, especially for someone who’s willfully chosen to be so Vulcan, and so instead of saying goodbye, she says, “I’ll go. With you. If you want. If it’d be helpful for you.”

He looks at her, his expression as inscrutable as ever.

“It is not necessary that you-“

“I said I’d go.”

Nothing about the way he holds himself, nor the expression on his face changes and yet something about him relaxes.

“Very well.”

“And maybe when you’re done looking at what I have so far on Romulan, we can meet up…” She wants to kick herself or groan out loud at repeatedly getting herself into these situations where she’s spending time with him, but she can’t seem to help herself. And anyway, she’s a Starfleet officer – or training to be one – and she might as well get used to personal sacrifices in the name of helping someone else. “And if you have other questions or want to talk about Pike more, I can help.”

“Thank you,” he says as seriously and stern as ever. “I am free tomorrow and will have had an opportunity to review your work by then.”

“Great.”

He does that thing again where he gets three paces from her before turning to say goodbye.

“See you tomorrow, then, sir,” she replies and when he’s gone, she pulls out her comm to call Gaila. “I’m done,” she tells her when she answers. “What’s the plan?”

“Drop your padd off at the dorm and get to the Warp and Coil as soon as you can. Happy hour just started and I’m going to order you something so it’s ready when you get here.”

“Order it now,” Nyota suggests. “I don’t have to go by our room.”

“No padd?” Gaila asks, her excitement clear, even over the clamor of the bar in the background. “Did you throw it out finally? Yes!”

“No, long story. And get lots of drinks. Multiple drinks. All of the drinks.”

“Done,” Gaila agrees. “This is the best day ever.”

“It’s certainly an interesting one,” Nyota agrees, casting one last look at where the Commander is still in sight, a tall, lean figure in black against the backdrop of the Academy, before she jogs down the library’s steps and heads to find Gaila.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the enthusiasm over this story! It’s a wacky, crazy road for these two and not a normal premise for them and therefore I just want to say that all the reviews and PMs are awesome and helpful and really make a difference as I continue tweak this and that as I edit the upcoming chapters. I’ve never written something so long that has these two at such odds and so unfamiliar with each other. it’s much harder than a more simple romance where they understand the other off the bat and your comments help me navigate that path. You can all have handfuls of Gaila’s reserved-for-enthusiasm-for-fake-dating popcorn!


	7. Chapter 7

“Mini golf is a recreational sport which approximates the more standard form of the game with smaller putting greens and clubs,” the Commander says as he pulls the chair out across from her. She moves three padds and a filmplast out of his way so that he has room for his own materials, which include the padd she lent him yesterday to look at. He continues without pausing, even as he neatly lines up his stylus along the edge of his padd, what is probably a perfect centimeter of space between them. “Often the courses are designed with themes in mind, such as 18th century pirates or long extinct dinosaurs, and it has proven a popular activity among families with young children.”

“Uh. Yes, that’s right.”

“Curious. Are you proficient in this particular sport?”

“I got a hole in one, once.”

“Is that indicative of mastery?”

“I did it by accident. But it was on the one with a windmill, so there’s that.”

“My research did not mention windmills in concurrence with this activity. Are they used to power some aspect of the course?”

“No, they’re-“ She holds her hand about two feet above the floor. “Small.”

“Why function do they serve?”

“They… they spin? The arms? And make it harder to hit the ball through.”

“Through what?”

“Through the windmill.”

“They are permeable?”

“There’s like a-“ she cups her hands above the table, moving them back and forth as she demonstrates a tunnel. “In the middle of it and you want to get the ball through there.”

“Why?”

“To get it in the hole.”

“So that one can proceed to the next level.”

“Yes, exactly. They’re not called levels, but yes that’s the general idea.”

“What is the correct term?”

“Hole.”

“I understand that the object is to use the club to direct the ball into the hole.”

“No, but it’s also the word used for each discrete… level.”

His brows draw together as he watches her. “Your language is imprecise.”

She frowns right back at him. 

“If you grew up with a human mother, you were very likely raised bilingual in Vulcan and Standard.”

“That is correct.”

“It’s your language too, then,” she says.

He starts to respond, pauses, then pushes the padd of hers he had across the table towards her.

“You incorrectly coded your list of Romulan conjunctions.” She just looks at him for a long time without reaching for the padd. He looks down at it and then back up at her, his head tipping to the side. “Was that not acceptable to tell you?”

“It’s fine. I have no doubt I did it wrong, that’s why you were looking at it,” she replies, finally, tamping down the irritation that threatens to rush through her from his swift turnaround. Getting mad at him isn’t going to get her anywhere. “What exactly was the issue?”

His brows draw together so that familiar furrow forms between them and when he finally speaks again to explain her error, his voice is even and measured, soft almost, in a way.

She quickly loses time reading over his rather exacting comments on the language tutorial and it’s not until later that she realizes she’s starving and falling asleep at the same time. She tries to tamp down on the urge to stretch and shift in her chair after sitting still for so long, but finds she can’t, what with how restless she is now that she’s actually thought about how long they’ve been working.

“I might need a break,” she eventually says, even though she’s loath to admit any frailty in the face of his seemingly unending endurance.

He just nods and doesn’t speak and doesn’t look up from the half dozens padds they’ve spread out across the table.

She crosses to the replicator bank set into the wall, thinking that while the student union doesn’t boast the same assortment of refreshments as if they had chosen to meet in the mess hall, at least they’re not in the library. She orders up a coffee and an apple, which is never as good replicated as they are the handful of times throughout the year the Academy gets fresh ones, but it’s satisfyingly crunchy.

She wanders along the edge of the room, glancing around at the empty tables that are normally full of cadets, and perusing the various flyers that are still on display from the end of spring semester. There’s one for the Academy Chorale, which she thought about joining once, and one for the Xenolinguistics Club, which a number of her friends are in, but she has never quite found time for.

She wishes some of these things would meet over the summer, but so many cadets are pursuing internships off-world or are serving as acting ensigns on starships that she knows there’s really no point.

And just thinking of the various interesting things all of her classmates are up to gives rise to a certain annoyance with herself. She should have just applied for something, found herself on some planet somewhere studying this or that, or in a communications bay on the Farragut or Hood. But no, she wanted to do her paper and look where it got her, she thinks despondently as she chews angrily at her apple.

She hears the tap of boots and turns, expecting to see the Commander coming after her, ready to keep working.

Instead, it’s Dean Stoyer and Nyota reflexively smooths her uniform skirt and stands up straighter.

“Cadet,” the Dean nods.

“Sir,” Nyota responds, as crisp as she can.

Stoyer is well known and well respected and well feared among cadets, a near legendary figure with the sole purpose of keeping students in line for their four years at the Academy. Every year, Stoyer addresses the student body, and every year reminds them that being called into her office as a result of misbehavior is the absolute last thing any of them want to endure, so they had better memorize and obey all Academy and Starfleet regulations. She’s pretty sure Kirk has skirted very, very close to such a meeting with the Dean and probably only luck, or McCoy hauling him out of whatever trouble he had gotten himself into, had saved him.

And beyond Stoyer’s more than intimidating presence, the woman is a genius. An incredibly accomplished genius. Nyota’s read a handful of her papers and even though Stoyer focuses almost exclusively on studying organizational behavior and leadership, which is hardly Nyota’s discipline, the lines of reasoning and thoroughly well researched evidence is enough that Nyota would like nothing more than to someday produce a body of work that emulates what Stoyer’s done in her career. Her short career, at that, since she can’t be more than forty and seeing the Dean walk quickly across the empty hall of the student union, Nyota is seized, as she nearly always is whenever she sees Stoyer, with the urge to run after her and ask how she’s managed to do it all.

Nyota’s formulating something, anything, to say to her, hopefully something impressive and so incredibly outstanding that she’ll stick out among the myriad of cadets who routinely try to impress Stoyer, when to Nyota’s shock and excitement she approaches her and the Commander’s table.

And even more surprising, instead of rising to attention, the Commander greets the older woman with the ta’al, which she returns.

“Thought I’d find you here,” Stoyer says, pulling up a third chair and sitting in it without preamble. “Sorry about all the construction in the xenolinguistics building. Of course, if you would just transfer to Computer Sciences full time, this could all be avoided.”

The Dean is very nearly smiling, even at the Commander’s stern look in response to her comment.

“Perhaps if Lieutenant Commander Calder had properly informed the department’s faculty of such a disruption this summer-“ he starts and Stoyer just laughs.

“Poor Calder, he’ll never make it up to you after that problem with the heat in your office last winter.”

“It would be illogical to have a continued issue with him over such an occurrence.”

“And yet,” Stoyer smiles. “Reduced to working in the student union. You know, I think he might have done this to you on purpose this summer.”

“That is hardly professional,” he says and Stoyer laughs again and then, to Nyota’s surprise, looks over at her. Nyota focuses on unsticking her feet from the floor and approaching the table.

She sets her coffee down gingerly, figuring that the very last thing she needs to do is to end up dumping it all over the table, or even worse the Dean, and then is left with her apple core which is suddenly much more of a problem than if it had just been her and the Commander.

She only has one napkin and freezes when Stoyer holds out her hand to shake, torn between wiping off her hand and somehow squirreling away the remainder of the fruit. She settles for cleaning her fingers and then grasps the Dean’s hand with what she hopes is a firm and professional handshake.

“You’re Cadet Uhura,” Stoyer says and Nyota nods, pulling her chair back and trying to keep it from scraping obnoxiously over the floor. She perches on the very edge of it and folds her hands in her lap. She has no idea how the Dean knows who she is and hopes it really, really has nothing to do with the fact that through Gaila, she and Kirk have spent a fair amount of time together over the last year.

“Yes, sir, I am. It’s nice to meet you.”

“I’ve heard about your work in Carrick’s class. He was very impressed with your final paper.”

Nyota’s surprised and tries not to let it show too much, smoothing her skirt again for something to do with her hands. “Thank you, sir.”

“Not to mention the Commander here singing your praises all of last semester,” Stoyer says, casting a smile over at him, who just blinks at her.

“That is hardly accurate.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Stoyer reaches for the padd in front of the Commander, scrolling through the lines of programming he just finished inputting and Nyota takes the opportunity to remind herself to actually take a deep breath.

“The Cadet is creating a tutorial for Romulan,” he explains.

“You were just saying the other day that we should reconsider our stance on teaching Romulan, Spock,” Stoyer says quietly, still perusing their work and Nyota looks over at the Commander, surprised.

“It is logical.”

“Well, we’ll bear that in mind. Excellent work on this, you two. When will it be done? In time for next semester, I hope?”

“It can be,” he answers, taking the padd back when she holds it out to him. He looks over at Nyota and she realizes he’s glancing at her to confirm that it really can be ready by then.

“Definitely,” she agrees, excitement rising in her from the fact that she’s working on something Stoyer’s so interested in. 

“You have enough time, what with the Ambassador? I hear she’s a barrel of laughs.”

“She is not.”

Stoyer chuckles, then visibly schools herself as she quickly glances around the empty room. 

“I have no official opinion, of course,” she says quickly, then shoots Nyota a knowing grin.

“Of course,” the Commander echoes. “She has recently taken the tactic of simply refusing to speak with me, so I have quite a bit of freedom in my schedule.”

“Oh, that must be so nice for you two,” Stoyer says and Nyota doesn’t quite know what to make of that.

“We’ve had plenty of time to work on all this,” she finally responds.

“I can see what the Commander likes about you,” Stoyer says with another quick grin. “You’re bringing Uhura to that big dinner next week, right Spock?”

“She is planning to attend,” he answers, his dark eyes cutting over to her.

“Wonderful. And when are you two coming over to eat with just the two of us? You promised, Spock.”

“It may not be possible to-“ he says as he glances at Nyota again. She just shakes her head at him, confused. 

“Spock. Don’t make me make it an order.”

“You are hardly able to order either of us to attend a meal at your house.”

“Fine,” Stoyer says, smoothly turning from him to speak directly to Nyota. “The Commander was telling me the other day about a paper you’re working on with him. It just sounds fascinating,” the Dean continues and amid all the confusion of the conversation, Nyota feels that excitement rise in her again. “I’m always so very interested as to what our students pursue academically. Can I interest you in coming to my house for dinner to discuss your work and perhaps you can convince your research advisor to attend as well?”

“I…” Nyota starts, risking a glance at the Commander, who is just staring blandly at the Dean. Nyota has no real idea what’s going on, or why he promised to have dinner with Stoyer, or how to explain he’s actually her former research advisor due to extenuating circumstances, but there is really zero chance she’s going to give up an opportunity to have face time with a woman like Stoyer so he will just have to deal with that. “Absolutely, sir.”

“I like you,” Stoyer smiles. “And call me Arlene, please.”

“Arlene,” Nyota echoes, the name rolling around in her memory.

“That’s settled, I’ll let Puri know that you’re definitely coming, no excuses this time, so he can stop bugging you about it, Spock,” Stoyer says, rising from her chair and pushing it in. Puri, Nyota thinks, a number of things falling into place. Arlene, Doctor Puri’s wife. Arlene Stoyer, she realizes from seeing the name dozens of times, her brain catching up all at once. “And we’ll see you at dinner with Pike and everyone on Saturday.”

She leaves after exchanging the ta’al with the Commander once more, the gesture more of a wave than how achingly formal Nyota has normally seen it.

“That’s Dean Stoyer,” Nyota says quietly.

“Obviously.”

“You know Dean Stoyer?”

“That should have been apparent, Cadet.”

“Wow. She’s incredible.” He’s just looking at her and Nyota feels herself flush. “I’m just… wait. I thought you said you weren’t friends with any humans.”

“We are not friends.”

Nyota frowns at the door Stoyer just left through. “Are you sure?”

He hesitates. “Yes.”

She wants to ask him if he actually understands the definition of friendship, but won’t let herself because it just seems too rude. Instead she glances at the door the Dean just disappeared through and asks, “How long have you known her?”

“She was my and Puri’s Interspecies Ethics instructor our first semester at the Academy.”

“And that’s how they met?”

“Yes.”

“And then they started dating?”

“Yes, at the conclusion of the semester.”

“Oh, that’s so sweet,” Nyota says with a smile. “How long have they been married?”

“Three years, one month and four days.”

“That must have been right after you both graduated?” she asks.

“Yes, directly.”

Three years is not a lot of time in a Starfleet career, so Nyota can only imagine the type of officer both he and Puri are to already be tapped for senior positions on the Enterprise.

“Is she going to be on the Enterprise?” Nyota asks. “When you all leave for your mission after construction is complete?”

“Her contract with the Academy lasts three more years, and with construction slated to be completed in two, it is likely that there will be some amount of time that she will remain on Earth while the Doctor is serving aboard the ship.”

“I never really thought of that but I guess that’s pretty common,” Nyota says. It’s no wonder the Ambassador has such trouble finding officers who are in a relationship, if couples are forced to endure long separations due to different postings.

“If she so chooses, she will be able to request an assignment on board and both due to her competency as an officer as well as their marriage, it is unlikely it would be denied.”

“Don’t you get to decide as Pike’s XO?” Nyota asks.

He nods, then quickly clarifies. “It would be illogical, however, to approve such a posting due to any personal relationship that exists between myself and Doctor Puri or Dean Stoyer.”

“No, I know, I’m sure you wouldn’t do that,” Nyota says just as quick. After the little she’s gotten to know the Commander, the last thing she can imagine him doing is playing favorites. Rather, she thinks, probably tipping the balance so far to the other side that he’d deny such a posting rather than risk it seeming that he assigned the Dean to the Enterprise simply because he knows her.

She’s about to ask exactly what position Stoyer would be eligible to transfer into when her comm buzzes.

“My friend,” she explains when she sees Gaila’s ID on the screen.

“I am available continue our work tomorrow if you are otherwise unoccupied,” Spock says as she scrolls through the text.

“We don’t have to, this isn’t something I need to rush to.”

“You are exhibiting signs that your endurance for this project may be at an end without a longer break.”

“I’m fine,” she says stiffly.

“You consumed a piece of fruit and a caffeinated beverage, and we just finished working for five hours and thirty two minutes with no interruption. You have exceeded normal human endurance for such focused activity by-”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t-“ she starts, then forces herself to take a deep breath. Only when she’s slowly let it out does she let herself speak again. She has a headache that’s threatening behind her eyes at the thought of more work and as she imagines more hours spent over a padd, it just makes it worse. “Thank you for thinking of me. Tomorrow would be good. I’ll finish coming up with some basic, introductory phrases this afternoon, though, and send them to you.”

“That would be adequate.”

“Look, do you want me to just stay and work?”

“I just said that you working on your own would be adequate.”

“That’s not exactly an enthusiastic response.”

“Suitable,” he says. “Satisfactory.”

“Fine.”

“Cadet-“

“No, it’s great. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She stacks her padds and gets them into her bag before she remembers that she has a question she meant to ask him. “Where’s that dinner by the way, on Saturday? I need to figure out what I’m going to wear.”

“Your dress uniform.”

“No, I can’t-“ she takes another deep breath. She doesn’t have one yet, since they’re not issued to cadets, and it’s just too hard to explain to him that often women don’t wear them even if they have them, not when there’s an option to wear something more fun. “Where is it?”

“Jardinière,” he answers and her stomach starts to drop.

“No.”

“Yes,” he says carefully, in that way he has when she’s being more bafflingly human than normal. 

“Really?”

“That is the restaurant that the Captain has chosen. You are displaying signs of agitation and distress,” he says calmly, nodding to where her fingers are tight around the back of her chair. She lets go of it, not even realizing she was grabbing it. “Explain.”

“Say the name of the restaurant again,” she tells him and she drops her hand from where she’s rubbing at the bridge of her nose in time to see what looks very close to a sigh before his expression is blank once again.

“Jardinière.”

“Jardinière. Of course, visiting Ambassador and all.” She lets herself grimace, cursing the fact she didn’t quite think through her offer to go with him.

He looks at her for a long moment. “I do not understand your reticence. I believe it is a quite popular dining establishment.” She drags her toe across the floor and crosses her arms. When she doesn’t answer, or uncross her arms, he says, softer, “I would like to understand.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says lightly, stepping back from him.

She gives him a wave and hitches her bag up on her shoulder, turning to walk quickly towards the door.

Damn, she thinks when she hears his footsteps follow her through the door and down the hall.

He walks beside her as she finally reaches the main exit of the student union and she can feel his eyes on her before she finally stops, spins on her heel, and fixes him with a stare.

“What.”

“I believe, based upon your reaction, it is the particular restaurant to which you object, not the notion of dining with myself, my colleagues, nor the Ambassador.”

“I knew you were better at reading humans than you let on,” she mutters, dragging the strap of her bag up her shoulder again.

“What, specifically, is the issue?”

She presses her lips together and tries to calculate the odds that he’ll figure it out even without her telling him. High, she thinks. Incredibly, annoyingly good odds that he’ll put two and two together and probably just offer to…

“I can’t afford it,” she forces herself to tell him, making herself look at him, and not glance away like she wants to. “I mean, I can and I will since I said I’d go but I don’t have the salary that you all do, obviously, and that restaurant… It’s nice. Really nice. And all fresh ingredients? Nothing replicated? Not on a cadet budget. And no,” she says sharply, when he opens his mouth to speak. “No way. Don’t even think about it.”

“Is it not customary for me to extend the offer of-“

“No. I mean, yes, sure, humans buy each other dinner all the time. But no. Thank you, and I appreciate the offer, but I really can’t accept it. I’ll just… figure it out.”

It’s so unnerving, sometimes, the way he just looks at her, dark eyes boring into her like he’s trying to figure her out. She shifts under his gaze, fiddling with the strap of her bag until she makes herself stop.

“Your culture is very different than mine,” he finally says and she huffs out a laugh.

“Yeah, that’s been apparent since I met you.”

“It is just credits.”

“Yeah, but it’s…” she says, her words trailing off and she resorts to a vague wave, the type of which he probably hates from humans.

“It is what?”

“It’s… complicated.”

“Complicated,” he repeats. “You are not required to attend the dinner, Cadet.”

“It will not be the first I order water and an appetizer, Commander.”

An appetizer that could probably pay for most of her books for the next semester. But it’s fine, really, because it’s not like the olden days when she would have actually had to pay to go to school, and even the costs she incurs as a student are covered by the stipend all students in the Federation receive. She wasn’t necessarily planning on paying for such an expensive meal, but what she’s paid to attend the Academy is more than enough and she’ll just beg off the next time Gaila wants to go for drinks. Or next two times. Or three.

“Cadet…”

“Let me guess, it’s an emotional response to refuse to let someone else pay for your meal, and the only logical course of action is to accept goodwill when it is offered.”

“Yes.”

“What a wonderful society you grew up in.”

“In many ways it was.”

“Human’s emotional decisions must be baffling.”

“Often.” 

“Well that’s just great,” she sighs, folding her arms across her chest again. 

“You are being sarcastic.”

“Yes,” she nods, impressed despite herself at his ability to recognize that.

“I did not intend to upset you,” he says and his tone is as soft as it’s ever been.

“It’s fine.”

He pauses for a moment, then takes a breath, his head tipping to the side as he says, “Perhaps you would consider-“

“Are you going to leave it alone or are you going to just keep trying to convince me with logical argument after logical argument?” 

That crease forms between his slanted brows, his mouth slightly parted as he considers her words. 

“The latter,” he finally says.

“Of course. Of course you are.”

“I do not understand-

“You know what? Ok. Fine. Great. Buy me dinner,” she says even as she promises herself that she is never, ever going to accept a dinner invitation from this man again without knowing the exact parameters of it. “Enjoy the logic of the situation. It’ll be wonderful.”

“You are accepting my offer and yet you appear to remain upset.”

“Human incongruity. Paradox. Contradiction, what have you.”

“Fascinating.”

“It’ll be less fascinating if I order the steak,” she mutters, and then sighs when a furrow deepens between his brows and he frowns. “Joke.”

“Ah.”

They stand there and she squints across the quad, watching a group of officers in instructor blacks climb the stairs to T’Elah Hall and disappear inside.

It just reminds her of how empty the Academy seems, how instead of the bustle of students and professors during the semester, over summer its very nearly uninhabited. That earlier frustration with herself for staying on campus comes back and she wishes for the second time that day that she was off on some adventure.

But she’s not off exploring new worlds, no matter how much she would like to and how good a choice that would have been for her career. Instead, working on the Romulan language module is interesting enough and even though it feels a bit lackluster compared to what else she could be doing, she makes herself focus on the fact that Stoyer seemed enthusiastic about it.

But her paper’s even better, not lackluster at all. It’s actually still an exciting topic to her and Stoyer heard about it from the Commander and liked it. And, beyond that, the Commander’s still standing right in front of her and he kind of drives her nuts, but she also already agreed to have dinner with him and all his co-workers…

She glances up at him, considering.

“So after meeting Dean Stoyer-“

“Arlene.”

“Yes,” she says, still trying to think of Stoyer as someone who would have a first name and of the Commander as someone who would use it. “Well, you said the other day that you might still be willing to meet about my paper?”

“I did say that.”

“And, uh, that offer’s still open?”

“Yes.”

She inwardly groans, not quite believing what she’s about to say, but just sitting with Stoyer for a few minutes brought back Nyota’s urge to keep working until she can have the type of resume the other woman has. Getting there was never going to be easy, and this seems like a small enough price to pay for adding not just the Romulan tutorial to her resume, but maybe her paper as well. 

And he’s really not that bad. Most of the time.

And even when he is, he’s trying, and that’s something.

“I’m not in the habit of receiving favors I don’t return and like any member of Starfleet,” she tells him even though she can’t quite believe she’s doing this. With him. Again. “I have a vested interest in our new flagship’s construction.”

“You are suggesting reprising our earlier arrangement,” he states, bland as ever.

“Only if you want to.”

His eyes trace over her face for a long moment before it’s his turn to look out across the quad.

“After considering the change in the Ambassador’s behavior towards me since the last time you and I spoke, I find myself rather more willing to consider the salience of it. However I do not believe I have the necessary interpersonal skills to successfully carry out such a plan.”

She waves that off, the thought of her paper already burning brighter and brighter in her mind and sufficiently pushing out the lingering awkwardness and apprehension resuming their deal stirs in her.

“I can help you, tell you what to do.”

“That would be essential.” He pauses, then, looking down at her for a moment. “Beyond that, you will have continue to be honest with me so that we do not encounter further misunderstandings between us.”

“And you will continue to meet me halfway in interspecies compromises.”

“Yes.”

“And look, if we do this, we’re going to do it right this time.”

“Pardon?”

“As in actually get to know each other, make a bit of an effort,” she says, even though she’s willingly resigning herself to spending even more time with him to do so. But there’s no point in doing this and it not working, and she doesn’t see any other choice. It’s probably logical, or something.

“Is that necessary?”

“Do you want the Ambassador to point out that the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me is that I’m ‘not unintelligent’ in front of your boss, who’s counting on you to get those crystals?”

“That is high praise for a Vulcan.”

“Still not a Vulcan,” she says, pointing to herself. “Sorry.”

He presses his lips together before letting out a quiet breath in a way that might just have been a sigh.

“What do you propose?”

“I’ll think of something.” She allows herself a small smile. “I got you those schematics the first time we did this, dilithium crystals can’t be that hard.”

“You truly believe this will work?”

“I don’t know, but you’re frankly not getting very far on your own.” He looks like he doesn’t want to agree but can’t quite bring himself to argue with that fact. That just makes her smile wider, which finally softens his own expression. “Let’s try this again, Commander. Round two of pretending to date to achieve significant, professional goals.”


	8. Chapter 8

“No uniform,” Nyota says and the comm is stonily silent in her hand. She pointedly doesn’t look at Gaila shaking with silent laughter on her bed.

“Explain,” the Commander finally says, his voice curt.

“The point is to act like you’re making an effort, not like meeting me is the last item on your to-do list for the day.” There’s another silence and she sighs. “It is, isn’t it?”

“It is not a physical list as I am perfectly capable of remembering-“

“No uniform,” she repeats.

“I do not understand.”

“It’ll seem like you’re completely uncommitted.”

“I was under the impression that a lack of commitment was one of the things we had in common about this arrangement,” he says, that same dry tone coloring his voice in a way she’s beginning to think is his version of teasing. It’s cute, in it’s own way. Also, really annoying.

“Appear committed,” she sighs. “If we really want to convince the Ambassador about all of this so that you can get your crystals, and if she is really so invested in you dating someone then she will have researched what that means. And if Vulcans don’t date, and I’m human, it’s only logical that she then research Terran customs. And therefore-“

“I will wear something other than my uniform,” he interrupts, then pauses. “I apologize for-“

“It’s fine,” she sighs. “And look, you have to tell Captain Pike. Or get Puri to tell him.”

“I do not.”

“You do. What if the Ambassador asks him about us and he has no idea? You need Pike’s corroboration for this whole thing to work.”

“He will find out at dinner on Saturday.”

“Tell him before then, you still have a couple days,” she urges. “First, he’ll appreciate you sharing something like that if he really is on a campaign to befriend you.”

“He is not.”

“Second,” she continues, ignoring him. “It’s just going to be a lot less awkward for everyone if Pike isn’t shocked that you’re bringing someone. Really, if you want the Ambassador to believe this between us all of your colleagues should know, but let’s start with Pike.”

He’s silent again for a long time and Nyota tries to resist sighing again, knowing he’s turning all of this over in that brain of his, probably every single possible scenario and all likely outcomes he can think of.

“I do not wish to tell him I am in a committed relationship, nor do I think he would be much impressed with the knowledge of a farcical one,” he finally says and she wishes that he was just willing to lie since it would make this whole thing so much easier. Of course she would end up in this situation with someone who actually has morals and a sense of right and wrong.

“I think he’d think it was hilarious, if my roommate is any indication,” Nyota says, shaking her head at Gaila, who is twirling a curl around her finger and grinning. “Tell him you asked me out to dinner for tomorrow night. That’s all you need to say.”

“I have no current plans to ask you- oh.”

“We need to get to know each other if this is really going to work,” she explains. “And it would be good to honestly be able to say that we’d seen each other for something other than work recently.”

He’s silent again, then, even and measured and cool, asks, “Would you like to eat dinner together tomorrow night, Cadet Uhura?”

“Nyota.”

“Pardon?”

“Would you like to have dinner together tomorrow night, Nyota? Just say that. And then tell Pike you asked me that and that I said yes.”

He’s silent again for so long she wants to shake her comm in frustration. Or him, if he were there. Which he’s not, which is a good thing because Gaila’s laughing again.

“I was unaware it was appropriate to use your given name,” he eventually says.

“Yeah, it’s whatever, it’s fine. I mean, if you were really my… if we were actually seeing each other, that’s what you would call me,” she sighs. Gaila’s the only person at the Academy who calls her anything other than ‘Uhura’ or ‘Cadet’ and it feels strange to to encourage anything else. And especially with someone like the Commander, although she hardly thinks he’d be the one to finally reveal it to Kirk, a happenstance she’s all too concerned with preventing.

“Ah.” She glares down at her comm in the silence that follows, thinking she really has to set a time limit to these conversations if she’s going to get any work done tonight. “Would you like to have dinner tomorrow night, Nyota?”

It’s… weird to hear him say it. Not bad weird, just… weird.

“Yes. There, see? Easy,” she says quickly, trying to push the strangeness of the moment away. “Go tell Pike and I’ll send you my newest outline for my paper.”

“Very well.” He pauses again and she tries not to roll her eyes.

“Goodnight,” she says when he still doesn’t speak for another long moment.

“Goodnight, Nyota,” he says and she snaps her comm closed and glares at Gaila again.

“What.”

“You, him. Your paper. Pike. Everything. Everybody.” Gaila laughs so hard she actually snorts, which only makes her laugh harder. “You two are terrible at this. It’s so amazing.”

“We are not,” Nyota says, crossing her arms. “We’re fine.”

“You haven’t gone on a date since, oh I can’t even remember when. Not even the guy in the bar last spring – he was hot by the way - but the other guy. The short one-“

“-He wasn’t that short-“

“-And the Commander obviously has zero moves-“

“-He’s Vulcan, Gaila, they don’t do this sort of stuff, you know that. He’s completely out of his element.”

Gaila sits straight up. “You like him.”

“I do not like him, Gaila. The man is friends with Dean Stoyer and if I have anything to do about it, he’s going to end up friends with Captain Pike. If everything works out, I will have gotten a published paper, experience programming language tutorials, and the kind of networking most cadets can only dream of out of this summer. I just have to deal with him to actually achieve all of that, which is admittedly less than ideal.”

“All those things just make him your perfect boyfriend,” Gaila grins, settling back against her pillows.

“Gaila, he is the last thing from a perfect boyfriend.”

Those words echo in her mind, repeatedly, when she meets him for dinner the next evening.

“I do not understand the purpose of meeting for dinner,” he states without bothering to greet her. “Do you not wish to be working on your project?”

“Yes. I do. But this isn’t going to work without some dedication on our parts and if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right this time and really get to know each other. So well, in fact, that the Ambassador is going to be so convinced that we’re in love that she starts ordering up suitcases of dilithium crystals.”

“You realize that the number of crystals needed is only-“

“Where do you want to eat?” she asks, cutting him off.

He presses his lips together and gives her what she assumes is the Vulcan equivalent of a long suffering look. Mostly it’s just blank and stern.

“I often dine in the mess hall and at the faculty club.”

“That’s it?” she asks. 

“Or my apartment or office. It is rare that I eat at a restaurant.”

“Right,” she says slowly, since the last thing she wants is to be alone with him in his quarters. “Well. Any place you’ve wanted to try?”

“No.”

“Any place you have tried and want to go back to?”

“No.”

“What kind of food do you like?”

“I enjoy a variety of cuisines.”

“I’m starting to see why women in the department would walk up to you, talk for a minute or two, and just walk away sighing.”

“I wondered that as well.”

She nearly groans and takes a moment to push her hair out of her face, smoothing it back behind her ears. She had left it down for their ostensible date and borrowed a pair of heels from Gaila so that she wouldn’t feel as damn short next to him as she usually does in her uniform boots. The trade off is that she doesn’t really want to walk that far and the idea of dragging out the evening even longer by taking a bus somewhere is not overly appealing, so wherever they choose had better be close by.

“Where would you take me if you wanted to impress me? Or if you were trying to guess what I might like?” she asks finally and the question seems to stymie him.

“I am not attempting to impress you, nor do I have any evidence as to what you might wish to eat. You consume a varied diet of most Terran food groups but that does not provide sufficient insight into your dining preferences.” He pauses, that familiar crease appearing between his brows. “What would you do in such a situation?”

“Uh, suggest somewhere with vegetarian dishes? None of the seafood places in the Marina District, or steakhouses. Or… oh, I know! What about that Vulcan restaurant? The one by HQ? Is that good?”

If she didn’t know better, she would swear he looks surprised. “You wish to eat at a Vulcan establishment?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Because the dishes are ill suited to human consumption and you would find very few palatable or pleasing.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.” Silence falls between them again until she purses her lips and sighs through her nose. “Well, how bad can it be?”

He raises an eyebrow in a way that seems to be the Vulcan equivalent of answering ‘very’ but finally nods.

HQ isn’t that far from the Academy, so she’s walked past the restaurant a half dozen times but has never thought to actually go in, and has never really thought about what might be on the other side of the door. It’s like leaving San Francisco completely behind. Everything is slightly off, the way the tables are arranged, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a host, the strains of ka’athrya music playing softly instead of something Terran, and the way the room is so hot that she quite nearly feels like she just walked into a different planet all together. The décor is all reds and tans and oranges and the light is different, slightly more golden and rust colored so that she has to blink a couple times before her eyes adjust. The entire room also smells fantastic, rich spices and a scent that seems very near a curry, and something else that reminds her quite a bit of a dish her grandmother used to make.

The blast of heat makes her wish she had worn something other than a sweater over her dress but it’s basically law in San Francisco that you should dress in layers and summer or not, it’s not the warmest city. Even so, the dry heat of the room makes her want to take it off, but she can’t remember a single instance she’s even seen a Vulcan covered in less than head to toe robes, so she leaves it buttoned even though bare shoulders and only the thin straps of her dress would feel so much better.

She casts a glance at the Commander’s slacks and sweater and wonders if he wouldn’t have worn something else entirely if he had thought they would be eating there.

She’s debating whether or not that’s too personal to ask him when he starts walking into the main room of the restaurant without preamble.

“We can just sit down?” 

“There is no need to be shown to a table when it is clear which ones are available,” he answers.

The table is nearly identical to how it would be set in a Terran restaurant and she wonders at the similarities. She’s on the verge of asking about it, whether or not it’s something adopted from the restaurant being on Earth or if there isn’t some amount of cultural convergent evolution that resulted in dining establishments with such similarities, when she’s distracted by the silverware. It’s bigger and heftier than a Terran fork or knife would be, but then again most Vulcans are taller and stronger than humans so maybe that makes sense. She glances over at his hands and thinks that it definitely makes sense.

She realizes, belatedly, that she’s still staring at his hands when a waiter appears next to her.

“Welcome,” the waiter says in Vulcan and his words wrench her focus onto trying to place his accent and trying to guess what dialect he might speak, and therefore what part of the planet he might be from that it takes her a moment to realize he’s holding out a menu to her.

“Thank you,” she says but fumbles the phrase because she’s suddenly unsure if she should use the formal address since she doesn’t know him, or the familiar one since he’s serving them food.

“She will have a glass of water,” Spock says and the waiter nods and melts into the background. 

She already spoke Vulcan when she enrolled at the Academy, so she never had him as an instructor in it, and she realizes, glancing across the table as he studies the menu in front of him that she’s never heard him speak it.

She’s always thought that people sound much more like themselves if she can hear them in their own language, and listening to him talk to the waiter proves no exception to that rule. Despite how measured his voice is, and despite the inexpressiveness of his tone, there’s something about the way he speaks that’s less stilted, like the words are much easier for him to get out in Vulcan than anything she’s ever heard him say in Standard.

“Vulcans do not have the same hydration needs as humans do.”

“What?”

“He would not have brought you any water.”

“Did you grow up in Shi’Kahr?” she asks, then shakes herself. “Oh, sorry, I meant thank you.”

“I did. And you are welcome.”

“Sorry, I just...” She brushes her hair back for something to do with her hands. “Your accent,” she explains.

“You learned Vulcan from a native of Shi’Kahr?” he asks and the way he says the name of the city is different than how she is able to pronounce it, no matter how many years of practice she has and how many languages she speaks.

“No, she was from T’Paal but I used to watch the newscasts from Shi’Kahr so I could listen to the language as much as possible while I was learning it.” She carefully smooths her hands over her lap and tries not to wince at her own pronunciation of Vulcan cities with him sitting there across from her. “I heard all about the controversy over the repairs on the Temple of Amonak, and the elections of the High Council that year, and that explosion at the Starfleet Base near the city.”

“Those are not recent events.”

“Oh, no, I was in high school, it was a while ago.”

“Your secondary school offered Vulcan as a language option?” he asks. “Is that common?”

“No, I just learned it on my own from a professor who was spending a year teaching in Mombasa. He let me sit in on his classes when I could, and would give me some readings to do.” Nyota reaches out and finally pulls her menu towards her and begins to study it. “It was really nice of him to do all that for me.”

“It is logical to teach a skill one possess to others who would like to acquire it.”

“Ok, then tell me what balkra means. And dyrk. And kap-yar.”

He has to translate nearly a dozen other words and she finally just puts her menu back down and shakes her head at it. Learning a language is one thing, but figuring out how to actually live and operate in a culture is another, something that trying to decide on her dinner reminds her of. “Guess it would be logical to just ask for a menu in Standard? He’s not going to assume I need one unless I say something?”

“No.”

“Maybe you should just order for me,” she suggests.

“I do not know what you would prefer.”

She waves that off. “Get me whatever you mom likes.”

He glances up at her, a quick rise of his eyes from his menu to her face before he blinks. “I see.”

He orders when the waiter comes back with her water and she barely listens, too focused on the embroidery on the waiter’s robes, something she hadn’t noticed the last time he’d come by. It’s done in rich golds and silvers against the black and while Nyota can read Vulcan script, it’s hard to make out the characters with the way the fabric’s falling and she’s too shy to just sit there and stare.

“What do his robes say?” she asks once he’s out of earshot again. Or she hopes he’s out of earshot, since Vulcans are renowned for their hearing, which goes a long way to explaining why the music in the restaurant is so soft and the room is built in a way to muffle sounds as much as possible.

“They are the names of his and his wife’s clans.”

“Oh, neat,” she says, trying to not sound too enthusiastic in a room full of Vulcans. But it’s all so interesting and new and Spock seems willing enough to explain the intricacies of what she’s observed so far, so she really can’t help herself. “I’ve only ever seen those in books and the names are all so hard for humans to pronounce I’ve never even tried. So when you get married, you add your spouses’ name to your robes?” she asks before she can think about it. 

As soon as the words are out of her mouth she sees something tighten in him, before he’s carefully cool and calm again.

“When one gets married, yes, that is the tradition.”

“Um, sorry. I didn’t mean-“ To bring up the fact that he’s single when it’s obviously a huge aberration in his culture, she meant to finish that sentence, but he interrupts her.

“It is of no-“

“But I’m really sorry,” she interrupts before he can brush it off. “Whatever happened, it’s none of my business. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

She can hear a waiter taking orders from a table near them, the hiss of the door as it opens onto the street to let another couple walk in, and then closes behind them, and the soft, melodic notes of the Vulcan lyre playing over the sound system.

“If you want to talk about it…” she finally offers.

“I do not.”

“Sorry,” she says again and then amuses herself looking around the restaurant since he seems to want to suddenly ignore that she’s even sitting there. It’s getting pretty full and what’s more, everyone seems to know each other. There are quiet nods and quick ta’als exchanged between groups, and more than once someone rises from their table to approach another. “Not many Vulcans on Earth?” she guesses, breaking the silence that has fallen between them. “Everyone seems to know each other.”

“That is so.”

“Do you know many of these people?”

“Not personally.”

“They seem to know who you are,” she points out, watching yet another Vulcan glance over at the Commander and then wants to put her foot in her mouth at the look he levels at her.

Then, to her surprise, he actually responds to that instead of changing the subject like she would have guessed he would do. Or just remain silent, since that seems to be his other tactic whenever they try to hold a conversation about anything other than work.

“I believe a number of them are acquainted with my father,” he explains. “Furthermore, as the only Vulcan currently serving in Starfleet, I am quite distinct among the Vulcans who come to Earth to work in other careers.”

She wants to ask if him being half human has anything to do with his apparent renown as well, but doesn’t let herself.

“What does your father do?” she asks instead.

“He is the Vulcan Ambassador to Earth.”

She chokes on the sip of water she just took.

“You, ah, never mentioned that. Ambassador Sarek, right?” she asks, quickly wiping off her mouth with her napkin. She remembers his name from the newscasts and newspaper articles she reads when she gets a chance to catch up on current events, and the recordings that she listened to while learning Vulcan. And actually, come to think of it, maybe she did know that he has a human wife.

“Was not the purpose of this dinner to learn more particulars about each other’s lives?” he asks stiffly.

“Yes.”

“Is that not the type of information typically exchanged in such a situation?”

Nyota has to actually think back over past dates she’s been on, since it’s been so long that none spring readily to mind.

“Yes,” she finally repeats. “I just didn’t realize he’s your father.”

“That is apparent.”

“It’s pretty interesting.”

“Is it.”

“We can talk about something else,” she offers. 

“I would prefer that,” he says, then doesn’t volunteer a different topic. 

Instead, he just looks at her and she presses her lips together, hoping that nobody else in the restaurant finds the aching silence that stretches between them as awkward as she does. Then again, Vulcans probably aren’t predisposed to noticing how awkward something like that would be, or Spock would be much more of a help keeping the conversation going. “Um. Well, read any good books recently?”

“No.”

“Have any funny stories of you and Puri at the Academy?”

“Hardly.”

“Want to talk about Pike? Or any of your other colleagues?”

“Not at this juncture.”

“Did you tell him about tonight?”

“Yes.”

“How’d that go?”

“Acceptably.”

“Ok.” She purses her lips and stares around the restaurant for a long moment, trying to come up with something to ask him about that won’t earn such stony responses, but her mind’s drawing a blank. “Want to talk about our work?” she asks, since that often seems like the only topic that they can actually sustain for longer than three sentences at a time.

“You stated the we are to further understand the specifics of each other’s backgrounds during this meal. Discussing our work will not aid the stated goal of learning about each other.”

“Ok, but then you have to actually try,” she tells him. “At least attempt to make an effort.”

His expression just gets a little blanker for a moment, before he seems to also decide that staring around the room is preferable to actually looking at each other.

“I have learned much of the details of your past from your personnel file.”

“Which you read?” she asks.

“Naturally,” he answers and she tries to decide if it’s worth telling him how creepy that is.

“Anything stick out?” she asks, trying to remember exactly what’s in it. A lot, really, most of her background was laid out for her Academy application, but she doesn’t exactly knows what ends up in her file, and what’s accessible to professors who decide to go snooping. “And seriously, why did you read it? And when?”

“I wished to ascertain the veracity of your claim that you were a top student and that it would be worth the time to work on a paper with you.”

“What, I didn’t do well enough in your class?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at him. “Because I’m pretty sure I was at the top of it. Or near enough.”

“You were one of the top students.”

“One of,” she repeats, wondering if she can get him to tell her who scored above her. Unlikely. “So what did you find, exactly? In my file?”

But he doesn’t answer because the waiter returns with the check, and if that’s not distracting enough, Spock thanks him and she can’t help but listen to how he speaks Vulcan again.

“Why did you use that phrase to express appreciation? Is it- wait. Why did he bring that now?” she asks.

“Because we have ordered.”

“But we don’t have our food.”

“We have placed our order and therefore the total can be calculated and we can pay.”

She finds herself smiling, just a little. “Guess there’s no such thing as getting dessert?”

“Precisely,” he says as he reaches for the bill and she feels her smile fade immediately.

“No, let me-“ she starts, reaching for it too, which earns her a raised eyebrow.

“You do not earn as large a salary as I do.”

“Wow. Thanks for that. Really. That was great. Want to calculate the discrepancy?”

“I am aware of the difference in our pay scales as I was once a cadet and furthermore, my statements is fact.”

“Which does not mean it’s necessary to go around pointing it out,” she says, resisting the urge to cross her arms. Or just reach across the table and grab the bill from him. “I’m not going to invite you out to dinner and then expect you to pay for it.”

“You did not invite me, you informed me that I should invite you. And the fact remains that I earn-“

“Look, I’ll get this, you get dinner on Saturday and we’ll call it even. It’ll be great, like-“ She’s in a restaurant and admirably restrains herself from burying her face in her hands and groaning. “Like we’re actually dating. Maybe we can submit the receipts to the Ambassador.”

“Would that be possible?”

“No. Well, actually, maybe. You never know. Now c’mon, I don’t want you to pay for two meals of mine.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“But why, specifically?”

“Because, Spock. Just because.”

“You have not answered-“

“Why are you so incredibly difficult?”

“I am logical.”

“Difficult,” she repeats. “And if you want to talk about logic, isn’t there a certain rationality in a reciprocal offer to share purchases? And furthermore, I’m human, so it’s logical that I would make decisions based on emotion. And also, you can’t just use logic when you want to use it and not let me use it. And, I’ll add, the argument that just because you earn more is spurious at best because that completely negates any consideration of human culture, where we don’t disseminate differences in salaries when in social situations like this.” She crosses her arms and stares at him while he stares right back at her. “What,” she finally says when he still has spoken.

“I am waiting in order to ascertain if there is another item on your list,” he says but he slides the bill across the table towards her.

“Funny, Spock, that’s funny,” she says.

“It was not intended to be so.”

“Regular comedy hour over here,” she mutters. “How much do Vulcans tip?”

“Waiters are paid a salary. Tipping is illogical as performance should not be motivated by financial gain. Furthermore, we have not yet been here for sixty minutes.”

“Fine. Regular comedy twenty six minutes and forty three seconds,” she says, pulling a handful of credits out of her wallet. It figures that Vulcans would not only pay their staff well, but also be just so damn efficient and economical that their meal costs what a single tomato would at Jardinière.

“We have been here for precisely-“

“What was that?” she asks, starting to turn in her chair to try to locate the source of a loud squeal that cut off his sentence, before she can stop herself.

“A child.”

“Really?” she gapes, his explanation just making her want to look even more. She’s never seen a Vulcan child and the thought of tiny pointed ears and tiny slanted brows makes something inside her go soft and warm. 

“As logic is taught and is not an innate skill, Vulcan children can be quite…” he pauses, then doesn’t finish the sentence. “It is common for parents to bring their children out in public so that they can observe how adults behave, so that by the time they reach the age of five or six, they are capable of emulating such conduct.”

“Wow, that’s so young,” she says, then grins. “So Vulcan toddlers are like humans when they’re toddlers? Kind of difficult?”

“Hardly,” he answers but there’s something a lot like sarcasm underlying that word.

She’s so busy wondering if he’s even capable of sarcasm, the idea seeming less impossible than maybe it might have once, that their food arrives before she can prod at the topic of Vulcan childhood anymore.

“Oh, that smells good,” she says, twisting her hair around her hand to hold it back as she leans forward to inhale. “What is it?”

“Balk’ra mashya,” he answers.

“Kind of like a stew?” she asks, picking up the too large fork and poking at it. It looks like vegetables swimming in a thick, fragrant purple soup. 

“Yes, made from various vegetables and baked in plomeek broth. My mother finds it highly palatable.”

“It’s wonderful,” Nyota says when she has swallowed her first bite. “She has good taste. What did you get?”

“Pok’tar. It is similar to a Terran pasta dish, but made with a grain humans find rather repellant.”

“Can I try it anyway?” she asks, hoping she isn’t committing some Vulcan taboo by asking for a bite.

He raises an eyebrow at her question, but nods and holds out his hand for her fork. When he hands it back, it’s a good thing the handle is so big because it’s hard to take it from him without their fingers touching.

“Oh, it’s…” She reaches for her water and takes a long sip, trying to swallow what she just ate. “Oh, it’s like glue. But made from chalk.”

“My mother once referred to it as consuming wet talcum powder mixed with used coffee grounds.”

“Exactly,” Nyota agrees, chasing down that bite with one from her own plate, the heavy spices and flavors thankfully overpowering the remnants of bitterness Spock’s meal left in her mouth. “Guess I’ll remember to eat with a local next time I’m trying a new cuisine.”

“I would have perhaps expected you to have eaten here before, what with your interest in other cultures.”

“I don’t take much time off of school. And I don’t really…” She pokes at a foreign vegetable on her plate, feeling heat race to her cheeks. “You know how many languages I speak, but I’ve really only been off of Earth a couple times. I don’t know much about…” she trails off and gestures to their food, and then around them at the rest of the restaurant. “All of this,” she finishes, shrugging.

If that surprises him, he thankfully lets it neither show, nor comments on it.

“Where have you traveled when you did leave Earth?”

“We went to the moon on vacation once, and to Io.” She cuts the vegetable in half, deciding it looks rather like a potato, if potatoes were dark green on the inside. “That’s pretty much it. There were three of us and my parents were always busy with work and so school vacation mainly meant being dropped off at my grandparents in the morning and picked up at night when my parents got home from the office.”

“Is it common for other generations to provide childcare in human families?”

“Yes, definitely,” she nods. “I mean, depending on circumstances and how close everyone lives, but they were just down the street. And my three aunts also lived in the city and all of my mom’s brothers, so there was always someone to watch us.”

“I believe that might explain my mother’s frustration that none of my father’s family members were ever willing to watch me.”

“Probably,” Nyota agrees. “Vulcans don’t watch family member’s children?”

“It would have to be extenuating circumstance.”

“Yeah, that would drive me nuts too, then. I just can’t imagine moving to a foreign culture and living your entire life by other rules.”

“She is remarkable,” he says and she looks up from her plate again at the change in his tone.

“Well, I meant you, too,” she says lightly and then feels a flush creep up her cheeks when he looks up at her, his eyes dark in the dim light of the restaurant. She rushes to clarify. “I mean, also everyone who comes to the Academy. I only had to move across the planet, but I can go home for a weekend easily enough if I want to, and the food’s the same, and the climate similar enough. I’d love to live somewhere else someday and experience something so new and different.”

He’s still just looking at her and she feels the weight of his gaze for a long moment before he returns his attention to his dinner.

“You may find that if you are assigned to a starship, the experience will be more than foreign enough for you.”

“I hope so.”

“Is that why you came to the Academy? So that you could travel?” he asks and she nods, thinking that he’s far more perceptive than he lets on.

“Yes, definitely. Well, one reason. Serving the Federation of course, as well,” she answers and it’s his turn to nod. In the spirit of getting to know each other – and it’s just about the most common question thrown around in Starfleet – she asks the same of him. “What brought you here?”

“I wished to live on Earth.”

“That can’t be all of it,” she finally says when it doesn’t seem like he’s going to add anything else.

“It is not,” he confirms but doesn’t elaborate. Watching him focus intently on his meal, his demeanor as Vulcan as anyone else in this restaurant even though he’s there in Terran casual clothes and eating with a human, she decides that maybe it’s not the time yet to pry for a more thorough answer.

…

“How was it?” Gaila asks when Nyota gets home that night. 

“It was fine. Nice.”

“Wow. Resounding success, then, since you’re not throwing your stuff around and complaining about the man.”

Nyota just rolls her eyes and sits down on her bed to finally take her shoes off.

“He was still annoying, trust me. And here. Thanks for letting me borrow them.”

She drops her sweater she had taken off the moment they left the restaurant on the bed next to her and spends a long moment wiggling her toes, trying to get blood flowing to them again.

Gaila sits on her own bed, unusually quiet.

“You look nice, Ny.”

“Uh, thanks. Are you trying to tell me I usually don’t?”

“No, but is that a new dress?”

Nyota frowns down at herself. “No, I just hardly ever wear it.”

“Did the Commander like it?” Gaila asks with a sly grin.

“Oh shut up,” Nyota groans, rising from the bed and reaching behind her back to unzip it. “I don’t know how Vulcan women do it, wearing those robes all the time. I was sweating buckets by the time that meal was over and I’m sure being unbearably human.” 

“Where did you two eat, the sun?” Gaila grins. “Get it? Because-“

“I get it. And that Vulcan place. It was good, actually, but hotter than hell in there. And oh my God, Gaila, this family brought their baby and I have literally never seen anything so cute. They left before us and the ears! They were so little!”

“You two went out to dinner, dinner? I thought it was just dinner.”

“I… don’t understand.”

“It was like a date, date.”

“… Yes. It was. That being the idea of this whole thing.”

“What did you two talk about?”

“Stuff. Did you know his father is the Vulcan Ambassador? Not that he actually really said anything about that, but now I kind of want to look up news about Ambassador Sarek. Which would be creepy except that looking up facts about each other is apparently ok with Spock, which is kind of weird. Or logical. Or both. Probably not mutually exclusive,” Nyota says, slipping her earrings out and putting them on her dresser. “And I asked a million questions about basically everything in the room and probably drove him nuts.”

“Nuts, nuts? Or just kind of nuts? Do Vulcans even get nuts? Go nuts? Become nuts?”

“What? No, I mean, he answered all of them.”

“He likes you.”

“He does not. He tolerates me. And I’m pretty sure thinks I’m ridiculous.”

“Well, you think I’m ridiculous,” Gaila points out and Nyota pauses in pulling on her pajamas to roll her eyes again.

“Are you excited for your next big date with him?”

“No. Of course not. Yes. I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to spend that much time with so many officers. And I’ve never met Hawkins before, so that’ll be something to get to know him a bit.”

“Are you excited about meeting with the Commander about your paper again?” Gaila asks and Nyota nods.

“Definitely. He’s infuriating, but helpful. Like his own personal paradox.”

“He likes you,” Gaila says again, more firmly this time and Nyota just sighs. “There is zero chance he doesn’t.”

“Better check that math, Cadet,” Nyota says, shaking her head, and then pushing Gaila to one side of her bed and sitting down next to her. “And it’s my turn to pick which movie we’re watching, so no complaining about what I choose.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So because I love our favorite dorks and because I love writing I decided it would somehow be a good idea to start on another story while editing this one, and then decided that the holidays would make a good premise, and then realized that if I’m actually going to post it during the holidays that’s, like, almost now. So I’m going to start posting the new story, titled ‘For the Rest of Us’, concurrently with ‘The Place Between’ through New Years. Don’t worry that this will be put on hold because of the other story (though there is some significant restructuring of chapter 9 that needs to happen which might take a few days) and you should all go read my other story! It’s good! I swear! And, as ever, I would be remiss if I didn’t thank you all for your lovely reviews. You all made me laugh with the enthusiasm for S/U on a mini golf date and I promise it will be included!


	9. Chapter 9

“ _Akan-ha-talu_ ,” she says in Romulan.

“ _Akan-ha-talu_ ,” he repeats.

“No, the emphasis is on the last syllable.”

“ _Akan-ha-talu_ ,” he says again.

“Closer,” she tells since that seems nicer than pointing he’s not exactly getting anywhere.

“It was not.”

“It’s probably hard because it’s so close to Vulcan, right?”

“That fact should not render it more difficult than learning any other language.”

“Why don’t we wrap up for the day?” she suggests instead of doing what she really wants to, which is to ask him how logical frustration is. She glances into her mug and finds it empty, and she doesn’t really want another cup of tea, nor to occupy their table at the café if she’s not going to purchase anything else. “I need to go get ready, anyway.”

“Ready for?”

“Tonight?”

“We do not need to leave campus for three hours and eighteen minutes.”

“But I need to go get dressed.”

“You are currently dressed,” he says, glancing over her.

“No. I mean yes, I am, obviously, but I have to change.”

“And you expect that to take-“

“A sufficiently logical amount of time. See you soon,” she says, gathering up her padds in order to leave before he can get into the fact that she can’t get ready for an evening out with the efficiency of a Vulcan.

Or trying to leave, because he packs up his own things and is standing there, waiting, before she can even finish pushing her chair in.

“What, precisely, will take that amount of time?”

“You want a play by play?” she asks, slinging her bag over her shoulder and resisting the urge to roll her eyes.

“I am simply curious,” he says.

“It’s a big dinner, at a nice restaurant, with more senior officers than I think I’ve ever been around at one time.”

“That is hardly accurate. At Academy functions with the entirety of the faculty, students, and staff present-“

“And the Ambassador’s hardly going to be impressed if I just phone it in,” she continues without missing a beat.

“Phone what in, precisely?”

“Never mind.”

“Is a comm necessary?” he asks and his words a just a little too quick, a little less measured than she’s normally used to from him. “You have not explained-“

“Oh my God,” she says, pausing at the door to the café and staring up at him. “Are you nervous?”

“As that is an emotional response-“

“Are you unsure of the events of tonight?” she amends before he can build up any momentum.

“No.”

“It’s ok if you are, if you have more questions,” she says as she opens the door and steps out onto the street.

“I do not.”

“Ok.”

They get a half a block before he speaks again.

“I still do not understand why I must drive you. You are capable of navigating the city on your own.”

“We’ve been over this,” she says. “More than once. Trust me on this one.”

“But that does not explain-“

“What else?” He doesn’t answer, just keeps walking and not looking at her. “Do you have other things you want to go over?”

“I said that I do not.”

“I’m nervous, too, if that helps.”

“I am not-“

“Fine, I’m nervous, no ‘too’. It’s a weird situation to be in. Just being around the Ambassador would be hard just on its own, but your boss is there, along with all of your colleagues, and these are all officers who I would like to get to know for my own career and that definitely carries a certain amount of pressure for me.”

She gets a glance out of the corner of his eye before he’s staring straight ahead again.

“I see.”

She waits until they’re nearly back at campus and her dorm is in sight before speaking again.

“No comms, by the way. ‘Phone it in’ means being unenthusiastic, or not completing something as well as you could. It’s really archaic, from back before comms replaced the prior communication system on Earth.”

“I was not aware.”

“Yeah, I know.” She looks up at him for a moment before nodding her head at her dorm. “I’m going to go, I’ll see you soon.”

“Very well,” he says but the words are so short and clipped that she finds herself taking a small step towards him.

“You’re fine. It’s going to be fine.” He starts to answer, then doesn’t, his gaze fixed somewhere over her shoulder. “You’re going to pick me up, we’re going to drive there, have a lovely evening eating food that’s so expensive it would probably buy a small shuttlecraft, and then you’re going to drive me home and it’ll all be over. Simple, so simple.”

“A shuttlecraft costs-“

“See? That’s why Pike wants you around, no wonder he likes you so much,” she says lightly. “Who else at that table tonight is going to know the exact cost of a shuttlecraft?”

“Mr. Olson.”

“Oh. Yeah, probably.” She squints over at her dorm and lets out a long breath. “Look. We’re in this together, right? And I won’t- I don’t want to have a terrible evening, either. I’m rather invested in these people not thinking… Whatever. Not thinking whatever it is that would be bad for them to think.” But her assurances hardly seem to resolve his probably incredibly logical consternation, because his expression has slid from something perfectly bland to something a lot more strained, even if she’s entirely sure not a single muscle on his face moved. “You good?”

“Yes.”

“You sure.”

“Yes.”

“Ok,” she says, but barely gets the word out before he speaks, his own words coming in a rush.

“I understand that for humans, a significant other can at times be perceived as an indication of an individuals own attributes and characteristics.

“What?”

“I do not wish to reflect poorly upon you.”

“Oh.” That draws her up short and she just blinks at him. “Really?”

“That is what I just said.”

“But really, really?”

“Would it be helpful if I repeated myself?”

“No. That’s – that’s just very thoughtful. Thank you.”

“It is not thoughtful, it is a logical deduction based off of the irrational way in which Terran culture-“

“Yep, got it,” she says. She feels a bit like his revelation has rendered something in her mind as blank as the expression he has on his face, but she gamely forages ahead despite that, because she’s a linguist and she can figure out what to say. Probably. “You’re- you- you’re not…”

“Pardon?”

She purses her lips at him and gives him an annoyed look, which she knows is probably her expression around him more often than not. It’s fine, though, because he seems to constantly have one eyebrow raised, his head tipped to the side, and that furrow between his brows whenever she looks up at him.

And that’s it, really, isn’t it, constantly looking up at him like that, no matter how annoying she generally finds it.

“You’re tall.”

“I do not understand the way in which my height-“

“I mean, I meant- you’re considered rather attractive. By humans. Some humans. Other races, too. And you’re smart. Obviously. So.”

He waits and it’s not long before that furrow deepens. “So?”

“So it’s not- it’s-“

“Are you having difficulty expressing yourself?”

She crosses her arms and feels her jaw tighten. “I thought it would be illogical to state the obvious.”

“It is,” he says, then pauses, like he just realized what agreeing with her actually meant. “I-“

“Look, you’re the guy everyone wants to date even though I’m pretty sure half of the Academy is terrified of you, and you’ve got that serious, quiet thing going on and that’s kind of-“ Her mouth works, soundlessly, before she can get the rest of the words out. “Appealing. People find that attractive. Some people. Not everyone. But enough that I don’t think that being there with you would in anyway reflect poorly upon me. Probably the opposite, actually.”

“It is illogical to base a conception of a person’s merits, contributions to a relationship, or individual strengths or characteristics on physical attributes.”

“Well, fine. So glad to hear that Vulcans take such a wonderfully understanding and solicitous approach to the confluence of physical attractiveness and personality. Really. That’s incredible. Good for you. ”

“I am satisfied that you are glad to hear that.”

“Of course you are,” she mutters, hitching her bag up her shoulder and crossing her arms. “Yeah. So. Thanks for your… consideration, I guess, but don’t worry about it.”

“Very well.”

“Great.” She scrapes the sole of her boot against the cement of the sidewalk. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Ok. You’ll pick me up.”

“I said that I would.”

“You did.” She glances up at him again, then nods her head towards her dorm. “Bye.”

“Have a pleasant afternoon,” he tells her and then he’s gone, walking off towards where the faculty apartments are. She watches him go for a moment before shaking herself, dragging her bag up her shoulder again, and heading to her dorm.

…

“He’s teaching you Vulcan?” Gaila asks, frowning at Nyota’s nail polish collection. “These are terrible, Ny.”

“Then use your own.”

“Is learning Vulcan a euphemism for something raunchy and dirty?”

“No, it’s- you’re ridiculous, Gaila, he’s teaching me some parts of the language you wouldn’t learn in a class, and I’m teaching him Romulan.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s interested in the language and doesn’t speak it. Logical, then, to learn it, or whatever.”

“And you’re learning more Vulcan for your paper?”

“No, just because I’m interested, too.”

That finally makes Gaila look up at her and wipes the frown from her face Nyota’s nail polish choices have caused.

“Well isn’t that nice of him.”

“It is, I guess. Hair up or down?”

“Up. No, down. Actually, up. Up, definitely. Or down. Whichever.”

Nyota searches through her dresser, and then the small cabinet by the sink in their bathroom, and then through Gaila’s dresser.

“Really, these are so uninspired, Ny,” she says, picking up each bottle, sighing, and putting it back down.

“You took, and then lost, all of my hair pins. All of them. Again.”

“I think there’s a couple of them in the bottom of my bag.”

There are four, but one has gum all over it.

“Are you trying to sabotage this whole evening?” Nyota asks, rinsing the remaining three in the bathroom sink.

“Sabotage would be telling you to wear the dress you picked out.”

“I am completely capable of choosing my own clothes, thank you very much.”

The sound of a nail file scratching is the only response Nyota gets and she just scrubs harder at the pins.

When she pokes her head back in the room, Gaila’s filing her thumbnail and frowning again.

“I’m not sure you are.”

“I am,” Nyota assures her. “But, uh, if you had to choose which dress-“

Gaila launches herself off her bed and towards Nyota’s closet.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“I’m surprised you waited for me to,” Nyota mutters, dragging a brush through her hair as Gaila proceeds to pull most of her clothes out.

“This one, no, no, no, that won’t do. This one. Oh, and I love this one, too. Wait, the blue one. Or the white one. Or oh, this one is nice.” Gaila drops the dress she’s holding onto Nyota’s bed and puts her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you ever wear these? They’re just sitting in here and you have so many of them!”

“Because until quite recently, I didn’t spend my time going on fake dates with my research advisors.”

“I’m still so proud of you. Ok, this one,” Gaila says and Nyota doesn’t even pause in brushing her hair to shake her head. “Fine, this one. Not as short. Not as… plunging. Super demure and by demure I mean boring. C’mon, Ny, when are all these from? They’re awesome. Except for this one, which is lame so I’m sure you’ll choose it.”

“I do like that one,” Nyota says, grabbing for it before Gaila can do something that would render it conveniently unwearable for the evening.

“You know, if you would wear some of these out sometime, you wouldn’t be stuck fake dating people you hate.”

“I don’t hate him.”

Gaila frowns, still sorting through Nyota’s clothes. “I thought you definitely hated him, like a hundred percent, top capacity.”

“I don’t think you can even hate Vulcans, they’re too…”

“Logical?”

“Boring?”

“Speaking of, this dress is anything but boring, Ny,” Gaila says, holding up a bright red one Nyota hasn’t worn in so long she can’t really remember even owning it. “Can I borrow it?”

“Can you promise to not get bodily fluid on it? Your own or anyone else’s?” Nyota asks, sticking all three hairpins in her mouth and speaking around them.

“What if I wash it?”

“Doesn’t count,” Nyota tells her, trying to make something happen with three hairpins and not enough time.

She gets what’s most likely to fall into her food it pinned up enough that she’s fairly certain it won’t be dragging across her plate – and gets done in time to keep Gaila from beginning to sort through her jewelry.

“What? It’s all so shiny!”

“These or these?” Nyota asks, holding up two pairs of earrings.

“Put your dress on first.”

By the time Nyota’s clothed, has her shoes on, and is back to sorting through earrings and necklaces, Gaila has half her fingernails painted bright gold and is admiring the way they sparkle.

“Can you-?” Nyota asks, after fumbling for too long with the difficult clasp of her favorite necklace and trying to keep her hair up at the same time, and casting increasingly harried glances at the clock. “I have to go. He’s probably going to have a heart attack if I’m late.”

“Sorry,” Gaila shrugs, nodding her chin towards her wet nails.

“You plan stuff like this,” Nyota sighs.

“Yep. But you love me so much it doesn’t even matter.” Nyota levels an exasperated look at her roommate, reclining on her messy bed and already examining the nails of her other hand. “Have a nice night!”

“Thanks,” she says, taking one last quick look in the mirror, gathering up her bag and necklace, and being thankful that Vulcan disposition probably lends itself to being more helpful than Gaila.

Spock’s waiting for her outside and she realizes she never really explained that it wouldn’t have been inappropriate to come into the lobby of her dorm to get her. Instead, he’s standing next to a sleek black car and she wonders if it’s his or one of the Academy ones that officers can use. It’s looks too nice to be one of the standard rentals, all shiny and streamlined and the fact it has exactly zero scratches in the pristine paint job makes her think it more than likely belongs to him, though why he keeps a car in the city is beyond her.

“Hi,” she says, glancing over his dress grays. They’re perfectly pressed, not that she expected anything less, but he’s somehow managed to drive to her dorm without getting a single wrinkle on them and she thinks that’s no small feat.

“Hello.”

“Do you mind?” she asks. She holds out her necklace to him and he proves much more obliging than Gaila, taking it from her without question.

He’s so careful about it, though, and already looks so tense in that way of his, where he’s really just stiffer and more meticulous about everything, that she thinks she really doesn’t want to spend the night with an anxious fake-date, not when she can already feel butterflies of her own mounting in her stomach.

“You ok?” she asks as he steps behind her. She studies his reflection, warped as it is in the window of the car.

“By posing that question you are assuming an adverse emotional effect, which I can assure you-“

“Gotcha.”

She lifts her hair for him, wrapping it around her hand and drawing it forward over her shoulder, and she realizes she can feel a wash of warmth from his body so close to hers.

“I do not know what that means.”

“What? Wait, the other way around. Yeah, flip it so that part is facing out,” she instructs him and waits, while he patiently switches around the necklace so that it’ll go on properly. “Got you. I meant that I understand.”

“I see,” he says, the words clipped and she inwardly groans, wishing she hadn’t said something that seemed to give rise to how much of human culture and colloquialisms he constantly misses.

“Sorry,” she says, the hair on the back of her positively tingling from the heat of his hands so close to her skin. She feels the weight of the chain against her skin, cold and metallic, as he steps away from her.

“It is of no-“

“Of course it isn’t.” She glances over him again and he really is tall, no matter that she’s in a pair of heels that she was really hoping might begin to even things out. And she’s not even that short, which makes his height even more striking to her. “You look nice,” she tells him, trying to ease his nerves even though he probably doesn’t care how he looks.

“I am certain that my appearance is the same as it always in when I wear my dress uniform.”

“Well, whatever, then you always look nice when you wear it. I’m surprised you don’t have a gaggle of first years trailing after you right now.”

“Is the correct term for a group of first year students truly a ‘gaggle’?”

“If I tell you yes, will you repeat that fact during dinner tonight?” she asks, trying not to smile at how he says such a silly word so seriously.

“No.”

“Figured as much.”

“Then why did you-“

“Never mind.” She shakes her head at him and wonders, as she has so many times this summer, exactly how her life has shaken out that she’s doing this with him. “You’re supposed to tell me I look nice, too, you know. Human tradition, to tell a woman she looks beautiful.”

“Is that so?” His eyes flick over her and to her surprise, she feels her skin prickle like his hands are close to her again. “I am not in the habit of voicing the obvious,” he says coolly.

She has half a dozen things to say to that, but all of them catch in her throat. She raises her hand to the necklace, settling it and smoothing her hair, before brushing her palms down the front of her dress and tugging at it so that it sits right.

“Right,” she finally gets out, and then is so distracted by him opening the car door for her that she forgets to say anything else.

She’s just nervous, which is fine and probably logical with the fact that she’s about to be at a dinner with a group of people she wants to work for some day.

Spock is also completely silent on the drive there, expertly navigating San Francisco traffic. When she peeks at the speedometer, she can’t help but notice that he spends the entire trip going exactly the speed limit, which makes her smile, and his parallel parking skills are none other than exemplary and precise.

He keeps that carefully blank expression of his up until they start to cross the street and her arm brushes against his.

“Relax,” she whispers as they wait for a break in traffic to cross the street.

“What are you-“ he starts and she can feel his arm twitch, so close to hers that the fabric of his dress jacket nudges her bare arm.

“I am not walking in there with you with three feet between us,” she whispers as they cross the street, her heels and his boots beating out a staccato rhythm.

“I do not see the purpose of- Captain.”

“Wasn’t sure you were going to make it after all, Mr. Spock,” Pike says with a grin so wide the corner of his eyes crinkle.

“I was under the impression that it was hardly a choice, sir.”

“Ah, well, I’m sure you could have logiced up a reason.” Spock’s mouth tightens and Nyota doesn’t think it’s just from the Captain having made logic a verb. “And you,” Pike says, turning to her with one side of his mouth still pulled up in a grin. “You were in Iowa?”

It’s a question, as if the Captain’s not entirely certain, and frankly Nyota’s surprised that he even remembers her from that trip nearly a year ago now. Though, admittedly, being the subject of the bar fight that led to Kirk enlisting might have something to do with it.

In the moment where a human might have put their hand on her back, or her arm, Spock just inclines his head towards her.

“This is Nyota.”

“I have heard all about you,” Pike says, holding out a hand to her. “Though not from the Commander, of course.”

“It’s nice to meet you again,” she says, returning his firm handshake.

“Communications, right?”

“Yes, sir, focusing in xenolinguistics.”

“Which is how you two met?”

“Yes, this past semester.”

“Well isn’t that nice,” Pike says, shooting another look at Spock. “And here I thought it would be inadvisable to have my senior staff hold other positions in the ‘Fleet while we’re getting the ship ready.”

“As I assured you, I have plenty of time to serve in both capacities,” Spock says.

“And yet, not quite enough time to tell me about the lovely cadet here.”

“I informed you she would also be attending this dinner,” Spock says so stiffly that Nyota very nearly considers elbowing him, if it would make him relax at all.

“And aren’t we so lucky about that fact,” Pike says, grinning at Spock again. “To think I was worried that we were going to have to train Puri on dilithium crystal refinery techniques to ever get our ship off the ground.”

“The Enterprise is currently at Spacedock.”

“You must be excited about having it out of Iowa,” Nyota says, cutting into their conversation before the way Pike’s nearly laughing resolves itself into some type of comment about Spock’s observational skills. “I didn’t realize when I was out there that it was even so close to being space ready.”

“Really just a matter of the deck panels and life support systems,” Pikes says easily, his attention sliding back to her.

“I can’t believe how busy you two must be with getting everything ready,” she continues. “It all seems so complicated.”

“I’m pretty sure keeping a dozen languages straight in my head would be tougher,” Pike responds and she grins.

“More than a dozen, sir.”

“Save that for when Hawkins gets here,” Pike tells her and she has to smile again.

When Hawkins does walk in, closely followed by the Ambassador, Stoyer, and Puri, she has half a mind to ask Spock to switch seats with her, but they’re already settled at the long table the restaurant set aside for them and trying to explain the logic of sitting closer to the chief comms officer on the Enterprise seems possible, but too difficult. Instead, she resigns herself to continuing to listen to Pike’s explanation of Terran dining, the way he’s speaking to the Ambassador reminding her that comms officers aren’t the only ones trained in diplomacy, and that negotiating dinner rolls is probably the least of Pike’s worries when he’s on an away mission.

“They are unpalatable.”

“To be fair, you haven’t tried one yet,” Pike points out.

“I do not eat bread,” the Ambassador says sharply, one long fingered hand pointing to the offending basket the waiter has placed on the table.

“It’s a Terran custom,” Nyota explains. “They’ll bring menus soon, so that you can choose what you’d like.”

“I will wait.”

Nyota can’t help but think that Pike might have wanted to put Puri or Stoyer next to the Ambassador, but Spock and Puri already have their heads bent together over some conversation, and Stoyer’s on Puri’s other side talking to Hawkins, leaving the Saiph to Pike and Nyota and it hardly makes for a fun seating arrangement. Interesting, maybe, but also kind of a pain.

Luckily, she figures as she watches butter melt on the fluffy inside of her dinner roll and already dreaming about her first bite, the food will probably make up for it.

“Your crew is late,” the Ambassador says abruptly.

Pike glances down at the two empty chairs at the end of the table.

“I think McKenna and Olson were born late.”

“They did not hatch from their eggs when their gestation period was complete?”

“Eggs?” Pike asks.

“Eggs,” the Ambassador says firmly.

“Humans are mammals, we give birth to our young,” Nyota explains.

“Why?”

“Um,” Nyota says. She turns to Spock, who probably has six or seven advanced degrees in biology, but he’s still talking to Puri. “Because.”

“Then your two officers were not birthed in a timely manner?”

“It’s a metaphor,” Nyota says. “An idiom, an expression that we use to suggest that they often don’t arrive on time.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes figures of speech illustrate-“

“Why are they late?”

“We’re not late, we’re here, we’re here,” Olson says, brushing past other diners and zipping up the last few inches of his dress jacket. He’s slightly out of breath, his face flushed bright red. “The bus. Sorry, sir. Sirs. Captain, Commander. Ambassador.”

“Chief Engineer Olson,” Pike says, gesturing between him and the Ambassador.

“Hi, ma’am, nice to meet you. Doctor, hi, sir. Dean Stoyer, nice to see you again-“

“I’m a sir to you, too,” she says with a smile, leaning forward to shake his hand.

“Nice to see you again, sir,” he repeats, as exuberant and excited as Nyota’s ever seen him, the handful of times she’s been in the Engineering department with Gaila and he’s been passing through.

“Do you know Spock’s girlfriend?” Pike asks and Nyota realizes a beat too late, only after a silence that stretches for a second too long and everyone turns to her, that she, in fact, is who Pike is talking about.

“Hello,” she says maybe a shade too quickly, but Olson doesn’t seem to notice and eagerly reaches out to shake her hand.

“You’re friends with – what’s her name again?”

“Gaila.”

“That’s right,” he says. “Great to see you here.”

“And this is our helmsman, Lieutenant McKenna.”

She knows she’s staring, but the guy next to Olson that Pike just gestured to looks familiar. Really familiar, like she’s run into him before, or he’s always in the mess hall when she’s there, or must go to the gym when she does.

Except that she’s nearly entirely sure she doesn’t know him from Starfleet, and what’s even stranger is the way he keeps looking back and forth between her and Spock.

Then he gives her a tiny smile and she feels it drop through her like a stone.

“Hi,” she says, the very sight of him bringing back the heavy beat of the club, skin slicked with sweat after hours of dancing.

He gives her that grin, the one that led her to letting him take her hand and pull her deeper into the crowd, led her to let him slide his hands around her waist and down to her hips as the music drummed around them and the crowd pushed them together.

“I didn’t know you were…” he starts, then his eyes dart over her, and at Spock next to her again, and he draws himself up short. “Coming tonight.”

Didn’t know she was in Starfleet, she’s guessing how that sentence went. They didn’t get as far as names or any other type of introduction before she had finally left with Gaila, slightly disappointed that had been the end of the evening with him. He had given her his comm number with a shouted whisper that she should call him, but then it was midterms, and then finals, and then the whole thing with finding an advisor for her paper and she had pretty much forgotten about him.

“Nice to see you again,” she gets out.

“You are acquainted?” Spock asks her quietly, McKenna’s presence enough to finally pull his attention away from Puri.

“I’ll tell you later,” she whispers back, with no real intention of doing so but not exactly wanting to get into it. Spock just looks at her, then back at McKenna, who has sat on the other side of Hawkins, as far from her and Spock as he can get, and is talking to him a little too intensely.

“What are you discussing?” the Ambassador asks and Nyota feels herself wanting to shift in her seat under the piercing stare.

“Nothing.”

“It was not nothing.”

“It’s private,” Nyota says, firmer than she had intended.

The Ambassador continues to study her for a long moment and Nyota’s thankful that when she speaks again, it’s on a different topic.

“How is tea?”

“It’s good, it’s been good.” She resists the urge, again, to elbow Spock, this time to get him to corroborate her statement. Maybe there’s something to be said for telepathy, if she could somehow communicate to him that he should at least nod, but the last thing she wants to do is grab his hand. So, instead, she looks over at him and he gives her a sidelong glance out of the corner of his eye in return. “Right?”

“What has been good, specifically?”

“Tea?” she asks and when he doesn’t respond, she switches to Vulcan and drops her voice, trying to ignore the way Pike is watching her like he wants to start grinning again. “ _She wants to know-_ “ she hesitates, trying to find a Vulcan word for the concept of enjoying something. “ _If we are partial to the experience of… seeing each other. Passing time together. Your language really needs a word for… courtship. Wooing. Romance. Dating_ ,” she starts listing, slipping from Vulcan, which is useless, to other languages that she knows that Spock knows. “ _Will you make a positive remark in that regard?_ ” she asks in Vulcan again.

“ _Such as?_ ” he murmurs back, also in Vulcan.

“ _The specifics of what you chose do not matter._ ”

“ _More precise guidance would be preferable._ ”

_“You can inform her that the time we spend together presents you with an opportunity to learn Romulan.”_

_“I could learn Romulan even without being in your company, were I so inclined.”_

_“Then inform her that our interactions have given you the inclination to learn Romulan.”_

_“Please explain why that would -“_

_“It would be logical to listen to my advice,”_ she says, trying not to snap because Vulcan doesn’t exactly lend itself to doing so, and starts to launch into an explanation on how significant others often enjoy activities that they can do together when she’s thankfully saved by a waiter bringing her a menu.

“Terran meat is sub par compared to the selections on Saiph Prime,” the Ambassador says after giving her own menu a cursory glance.

“Is it,” Nyota says carefully.

“I do not like chicken. Or pork.”

“Have you tried bacon?” Nyota asks.

“It is cured and smoked. I prefer my food unadulterated.”

“Oh. I guess that it is.”

Nyota’s never really thought about it, only having had replicated bacon and has half a mind to see if she can order some.

But it’s not on the menu, though the selection that is available makes her mouth water. It puts her in mind of meals at her grandparent’s house, their garden brimming with fresh fruits and vegetables that she would help bring in for supper.

“What are you getting?” she finally asks Spock.

“Why does it matter?” he asks, though it’s thankfully quiet enough that his curt tone doesn’t attract any attention.

“Never mind.”

He probably memorized the menu as soon as he had it in his hands and it’s been lying on his plate for the last few minutes while she’s been studying her own, but she does notice that he glances at it again.

“Salad,” he finally answers.

“Spock. You are not just getting a salad.”

“Is that inappropriate? You did not say if-”

“Not it’s just… look. Agnolotti with white alba truffle, castelmagno and cultured butter. Or, wow, risotto with chanterelles, tomatoes, and crescenza. I don’t know what half of that stuff is, but it sounds delicious.”

“If you do not know the ingredients, how do you know you will enjoy consuming it?”

“Because.”

“That is not a sufficient answer.”

“Too bad.”

He looks down at the menu again, then up at her. “Those are not as nutritious.”

She looks at him closely, ignoring the gale of laughter from down the table as Puri tells some story that has Stoyer and Olson in stitches, the Andorian’s antennae waving back and forth and both humans with their hands over their mouths trying to stifle their laughter. Spock is a sharp contrast to them, all angled brows and perfect posture in his dress grays.

“Salad,” she says again, softly, thinking back to the dozens of meals she’s shared with him by now, the way he’ll spend an inordinate amount of time making selections in the mess hall, or putting an overly complex order into the replicator. “Oh my God, Spock, you’re a picky eater.”

“I am not.”

“You are,” she says, feeling a grin tug at her mouth. “You eat bread and salad and plomeek soup and that’s it.”

“You observed me eat pok’tar.”

“I observed you eat two thirds of it and push all the little… what were they? Like zucchini?”

“ _P’la-savas_.”

“ _P’la-savas_ to the side. I bet your mom cut the crusts off your sandwiches.”

“She did no such thing.”

“Because, let me guess, Vulcans don’t eat sandwiches?” He pauses, his mouth half open, before he snaps it shut and nods. “She would have, I bet.” Nyota glances over the menu again before laying it on her plate, wanting to dig her elbow into his arm for completely different reasons than her earlier urge. “Well, suit yourself if you don’t want to try something new. I’m getting the risotto. I bet it’s phenomenal.”

“It will not be,” the Ambassador says, cutting into their conversation and Nyota only belatedly realizes the Saiph has just been sitting there watching Spock and her. “You should order meat.”

“I don’t actually eat much meat,” Nyota explains. “Only sometimes.”

“You should eat it for every meal.”

“I’ll, uh, take that under advisement, ma’am,” Nyota says diplomatically.

“Taele.”

“Pardon?”

“My name is Taele.”

Nyota isn’t quite sure what to say to that and darts a glance at Spock, who has one eyebrow raised and is basically no help at all.

“That’s a beautiful name,” she finally tells the Ambassador.

“It is not.”

“Oh,” Nyota nods. “Ok.”

More than anything, Nyota wishes she were next to Hawkins. Or Stoyer. Or Puri, who keeps making that end of the table laugh in a way that has other diners glancing over at them more than once, instead of the rather stilted conversation Pike tries to keep up with the Ambassador, and the way that Spock seems content to just sit completely silent beside her.

At least Pike keeps her – and his – wineglass full.

Their food arriving is beyond welcome and Nyota has to resist the urge to rubberneck at what everyone ordered. It all smells incredible in a way that mess hall food never does, and it looks even better, everything carefully arranged on the plates. Such delicious food reminds her of the night she and Spock went to the Vulcan restaurant and she can’t help but glance over at him next to her, the way that while everyone else is chatting and drinking wine and laughing more often than not, he’s sitting silently except when she speaks to him, or the once or twice he’s responded to a direct question of Pike’s. Everything here is different than that night, the music is coming from a piano in the corner of the room, the lights are brighter – not bright, but brighter – the noise from other diners rising and falling in contrast to how the other Vulcans had been so incredibly quiet, and now that she thinks about it, it is maybe a little inefficient that they’ll have to wait until after they’re completely done eating to pay, and then wait around while the bill is processed.

“You ok?” she asks when Spock begins picking at his salad and she realizes she hasn’t heard him say anything in way too long.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing to your olives?”

“I do not wish to eat them,” he says, continuing to carefully slide them into a neat row on the edge of his plate.

“Those are the best things ever,” she tells him.

“That is an exaggeration.”

“I’m not sure it is.”

“They are repugnant,” Taele informs both of them.

Repugnant is the way the Ambassador has both hands around a raw tenderloin and is taking enormous bites of it. At least Puri has mastered the use of a knife and fork in his time on Earth and he’s delicately sawing at his own raw rib eye in a much less conspicuous manner.

To her surprise, Spock reaches for her bread plate and neatly scoops the olives on to it, placing it next to her again in one fluid manner.

“Thanks,” she grins, already spearing one. “You don’t know what you’re missing, you know.”

“I find that I am able to endure the rampant curiosity,” he replies.

“That’s funny, Spock.”

“It was not intended to be amusing.”

“Didn’t think so,” she responds, popping another in her mouth.

“You should not eat those,” Taele tells her as she bites into another one.

“We have different digestive tracts,” Nyota replies as politely as she can, which only earns her a rather disapproving look.

“You eat no meat,” Taele says to Spock, her tone accusatory and disappointed all at once.

“That is correct.”

“Commander,” Olson says, leaning forward in his chair to catch Spock’s attention. “On the ship, if meat is replicated is it then considered vegetarian?”

“It should be,” Puri says, carefully slicing himself another bite of his steak. “It’s barely meat, it tastes like dust.”

“You should eat meat on the ship if it is vegetarian meat,” the Ambassador tells Spock.

“I would prefer not to.”

“You should,” the Ambassador says again before turning to Olson. “And you should improve the replicators so that the meat does not taste of dust. The fact that it does is distressing. I do not approve.”

“Our replicators are great,” Olson says quickly. “Or they will be. Right now all the coffee is bright blue and I can’t really figure out why.”

“Anything’s better than the Academy mess,” McKenna says and Nyota watches the way Spock glances down the table towards him before turning back to his salad.

“At least our coffee’s good,” Stoyer says as she takes another bite of her chicken.

“Good?” Pike asks. “Good? Arlene, I’m still shocked that cadets get through four years of the Academy without developing ulcers from drinking that stuff.”

“Well, now they’re developing ulcers from having Spock has a professor,” Stoyer says, grinning into her wineglass. “So the coffee’s only part of it.”

“I’m trying to decide if I would have passed any course that you taught,” Pike says, leveling a long look at Spock.

“We’re going to have him teach all of the sections of Interspecies Ethics next year. Those first years won’t stand a chance.”

“All of the sections?” Pike repeats. “C’mon, I need him too.”

“And now we have to share with Uhura,” Stoyer grins.

“That’s not-“ Nyota starts to say, then snaps her mouth shut and pokes at her risotto.

“That’s not what?” Pike asks.

“Nothing,” she says quickly, reaching for her wine before she can say anything along the lines of the fact that she will hardly continue to be a future contender for Spock’s attention.

“How much time per week do you two spend together?” Taele asks as Nyota takes a long sip from her glass.

“Um…”

“What is the average amount of time that couples spend interacting on weekly basis?”

“I don’t really know,” Nyota says carefully, setting her wineglass back down but leaving her hand around the stem.

“Do you believe you exceed the amount spent by other couples?”

“It’s, uh, it’s different for everyone,” she says.

“I am asking for you.”

“Well…” she starts, then just spins her wineglass around instead of answering. Or kicking Spock under the table so that maybe he’ll jump into the conversation and help her out.

“How many days per week do you see each other?”

“That’s not…” Nyota starts, then gives into the urge to take another drink of wine. “That’s not exactly a good way to estimate a relationship.”

“Why not?”

“Because, ah, the…” She pauses and tries again to think of a good answer.

“How much time do you spend together in private?”

“Woah, now, don’t need specifics,” Pike says, grinning and holding up his hands, palms out.

“I am curious,” the Ambassador says and Nyota is suddenly, horribly aware of how quiet the table is, everyone looking at her and Spock. Puri’s actually grinning, and Nyota doesn’t look but she doesn’t think he’s the only one.

“That’s-“ she starts, gripping her wineglass tightly and wishing that Pike would just pass her the bottle, which might make this topic bearable.

“It is none of your concern,” Spock says, smoothly and firmly and Nyota lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

Taele looks at him for a long moment, before turning her attention to Puri, who’s grin quickly fades.

“And yourself?”

“We live together, it’s different,” he explains.

“You and the Cadet should live together,” the Ambassador informs Spock. “It would facilitate more time spent in each other’s company.”

Stoyer looks like she’s trying not to laugh, but at least she saves Nyota from having to say anything. “Cadets have to live in the dorms. Part of the Academy experience. Class bonding and all.”

“You should have chosen to partner with someone your own rank, Commander.”

“Aw, there’s nothing more fun then the difficulties of dating an officer when you’re a cadet,” Puri says, grinning at his wife. “Keeps things interesting. We did it.”

“When did you marry?”

“After his graduation,” Stoyer says, returning Puri’s smile with a soft one of his own.

“You will marry the Cadet after her graduation, then,” the Ambassador says to Spock and this time when Nyota raises her wineglass, it’s to hide her smile in it, the notion of marrying the Commander so far fetched that it crosses into just being amusing.

“Aww, Uhura likes that idea,” Olson grins and Nyota’s surprised her glass doesn’t break with how quickly she puts it back on the table.

“What? No.” She freezes when she realizes what she just said and how quickly she answered that. “I mean-“

“Just messing with you,” Olson says with a laugh. “Anyways, it’d break Kirk’s heart.”

“You know Kirk?” Nyota groans, leaping maybe too quickly for a chance to change the topic, even if that new topic is that of her least favorite classmate.

“I love Kirk,” Olson grins. “Kid’s hilarious.”

“Kirk,” Pike says, his tone fond even as he shakes his head. “He is always talking about you, Uhura.”

“He’s under the misguided notion that we’re friends.” She turns to Olson and shoots him a grin of her own. “And I turn him down about three or four times a week, so he knows what’s coming.”

“Dunno, you might have competition, Commander,” Olson says with a broad smile.

Spock’s in the middle of chewing a cucumber when Olson says that and Nyota watches his throat work as he swallows. He doesn’t respond, just drops his gaze back down to his plate and cuts a tomato into precise, bite sized pieces.

“Hardly,” Nyota says lightly, thinking about maybe putting her hand on Spock somehow, but that’s just too strange to actually do, and Olson’s already laughing again and turning back to his own dinner, so the moment quickly passes. “ _He was making a joke_ ,” she says in Vulcan, when Spock still hasn’t stopped cutting vegetables into perfect cubes, even though his language hardly has an accurate translation for the word ‘joke’ and she has to make do with something that roughly translates to ‘a phrase used by other cultures to suggest amusement or to cause laughter’.

_“I am aware.”_

_“I do not think he intended-“_

_“It is of no consequence.”_

“Ok,” she says in Standard, then digs her fork into her risotto. She doesn’t bother to take another bite, though, just rests her fork on the edge of her plate and looks at Spock again. _“Do you wish to speak about it further?”_

_“No.”_

“Ok,” she says again. “Let me know if you do, I guess.”

“If I desire to, I will,” he says, slipping back into Standard as well, even as he stabs his fork into a piece of carrot.

“You survived,” she tells him, later, when everyone’s out on the sidewalk and she’s pulled him a couple steps away from the group.

“Obviously.”

“No, I meant…” She frowns at him. “You know what I mean.”

“You did not have a chance to speak with Lieutenant Hawkins.”

“I didn’t… did I tell you I wanted to?” Nyota asks, squinting up at him and trying to remember.

“It was a logical deduction.”

“Oh.”

She looks over at where Hawkins and McKenna have their heads bent over their comms, Olson standing near them and looking between Pike and Spock like he’s counting down the seconds until it’s socially acceptable to go. Probably deciding which bar to go to, she guesses, looking at the way they’re all standing to the side and talking quietly. Get a couple drinks, chat about the evening, and probably use the fact that they’re in dress uniforms to substantially increase their chances of picking someone up. She’s pretty sure that Spock would know the exact probability of going home with someone from a bar due to wearing dress grays, if he was the kind of guy to think about those things.

She imagines a different sort of evening, the type of which where she might have gone off with the group of men to see where the night took her. Gaila would, if she were here.

“Nyota?”

“What?” She glances back up at Spock and realizes he’s been waiting for her to say something. “Oh, no, it’s fine, I’ll talk to him some other time. But, uh, thank you. That was thoughtful of you. And thank you for dinner.”

“You are welcome,” he says, then doesn’t bother to specify which of her ‘thank yous’ it was for.

The younger officers are a sharp contrast to Stoyer, who’s yawning, one hand covering her mouth and her other wrapped around one of Puri’s, who already has his car keys out and is saying goodnight to everyone.

It makes Nyota want to yawn, too, or at least say something to Spock about being ready to go.

Before she has a chance, Taele appears next to them.

“I wish to see your ship,” she informs Spock without preamble. “Now.”

“I see,” he says and it’s funny, because something about the way he speaks is suddenly professional, and she didn’t realize that brisk tone had even slipped from his voice. But even with that, none of his customary stiffness is evident in his frame. He seems more at ease, almost, like going up to the ship might be the one thing she’s seen him ever do, other than maybe teaching, that he actually seems comfortable with. “Captain?”

Pike excuses himself from saying goodnight to Stoyer and Puri and comes over to them, already nodding. “Commander, you’re available now?”

It doesn’t seem like a question, more like a thinly veiled order, but Spock still nods.

“She will come too,” the Ambassador says, extending one long finger towards Nyota.

“She won’t, unfortunately. Security clearances and all, she doesn’t have her commission and she obviously doesn’t have your diplomatic status,” Pike corrects. “Sorry, Cadet.”

“Not at all, sir. You go ahead,” Nyota says quickly, her hand ghosting the air next to Spock’s arm, close enough she accidentally catches her palm on his elbow. She draws her hand back, flexing her fingers. “I can get myself home.”

She says it before he can either refuse an opportunity to show the Ambassador the Enterprise in the interest of driving Nyota back to her dorm, or forgetting all together that would be the polite thing to do for his ostensible girlfriend. She’s fairly convinced it’s an even chance either way and his expression doesn’t exactly give any clues to what he’s thinking.

“Spock drove you? We’ll take you on the way,” Pike offers. “The transporter station’s on the other side of the Academy anyway. And speaking of-“ Pike stops to grin over at Spock’s car. “Commander. Keys.”

“Sir?”

“That’s an order.”

“You cannot order me to surrender the keys to my own personal vehicle.”

“Stickler for the rules, this one,” Pike grins at Nyota, and something about the way he’s so clearly, incessantly, affectionate towards Spock, despite how unresponsive and reticent the Commander is makes her smile back.

Spock can’t be that much of a stickler, though, because he eventually surrenders his keys and slides into the backseat next to Nyota, Pike having offered the passenger seat to the Ambassador.

All the way back to the Academy, Spock’s sitting a careful distance from her, his hand splayed on his thigh and not on the seat between them and not holding her own, and he doesn’t look at, nor speak to her. More than once, she sees Pike glance in the rearview mirror at them and while he doesn’t question their silence, she feels it stretch between them.

Finally, she leans over to Spock and tugs on his sleeve so that he’ll lean down to her. Or that was her plan, since when he turns towards her all of a sudden their faces are too close together, the peculiar heat of his skin washing over her, and her nose brushing against his cheekbone when Pike takes a corner too hard. He freezes, his entire body going tense, and she pulls at his sleeve again, trying to get him to loosen up even as she focuses on not swaying into him again.

“Look,” she whispers, putting her mouth close enough to his ear that Pike and Taele can’t hear, but not so close she’s in danger of actually touching him again. “You’re going to have to walk me up to my dorm. They’ll notice if you don’t, ok? I know it’s probably not logical, but it’s this really archaic human tradition and it’s already weird enough that we’re just sitting here, not talking.”

“I have nothing to say,” he whispers back, his breath a wash of warmth across his cheek and she feels herself smile at his completely logical response.

“I know. Still.”

She lets go of his sleeve and retreats to her own side of the car, and her suggestion pays off, since when they arrive at campus and Pike pulls into the parking lot behind her dorm, Spock unbuckles his safety belt and quickly crosses to her door.

“Have a nice night,” she tells Pike and Taele. “It was wonderful talking with you, Ambassador. You as well, sir.”

“Night,” Pike says, turning around in his seat, his eyes crinkling as he smiles at her.

“Goodbye, human,” Taele says.

Spock opens her door for her – she has to hand it to him, he has excellent manners no matter how ridiculous he probably finds most Terran customs- and, true to her instructions, walks with her to the steps of her dorm.

“I do not understand what was so special about the distance from the car to here,” he states blandly, looking around like the answer is on the pavement beneath their feet.

“Trust me.”

He glances back at the car and then at her.

“I do.”

She smiles up at him. “Good.”

He looks at the car again, then takes a step back from her.

“Goodnight, Nyota.”

“Night, Spock. Thanks again for dinner.”

He’s turning to walk back and she’s already taking a step towards the door of her dorm when Pike’s voice rings out, clear and loud in the night air.

“C’mon, Spock, I’m not even watching.”

“I do not-“

“Oh, God,” she mutters, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “No.”

“At all,” Pike adds, and when she looks up he’s got the window rolled down and he’s smiling. She can see Taele leaning across him to watch her and Spock.

“He expects us to kiss,” Spock states blandly.

“Yep.”

Spock glances at the car once more and Pike grins at him.

“Another normal, Terran gesture?”

“Yeah, I mean, especially saying goodnight or goodbye. Um, you haven’t…” she trails off, her face growing hot.

“I have,” he says quickly and she nods just as quick. “I was simply unsure how ordinary it is in this situation.”

“Standard,” she answers. “Conventional, really.”

“I see.”

“But you, know, Pike is just obviously messing with you, so-“

He touches her cheek and it feels like a question, one she doesn’t know quite how to answer because she’s so focused on the heat of his skin and the intent look in his eyes as he watches her. She opens her mouth to say no, that they shouldn’t, that it’s weird, or it’s illogical or something like that, and he hesitates, starts to move away, but instead of saying any of those things, she finds herself nodding, the movement causing his finger to slip down from her cheek to her jaw.

The whole thing is fast, just his finger, warm, under her chin, and the soft press of his lips, warmer still, against hers, brief and cursory, all of it so perfunctory that she’s not even sure it’s happened until he pulls back, until the cool night air hits her face again and she finds that she has to open her eyes, unaware of having closed them.

There’s probably something illogical about not quite looking at each other, afterwards, but he’s the one who adheres to that principle for his life, so she has no problem staring somewhere past his shoulder until he turns and walks back to the car.

Gaila’s not there when she gets back to their room, and Nyota thinks that’s only because there was no way her roommate could have predicted what just happened. Nyota couldn’t have either, and still rather can’t believe it, no matter how long she sits on the edge of her bed, one of her heels in one hand and the other playing with her necklace as she stares into some middle distance, her mind racing and empty all at once.


	10. Chapter 10

She doesn’t let herself hesitate as she walks over to the table he’s chosen in the mess hall, nor does she let herself dwell on the fact that she’s running a couple minutes late, since she wasn’t exactly rushing to their meeting.

“Hi,” she says and then can’t really come up with what to say next, so she just puts her plate down across from him.

“Hello,” he responds and thankfully, for once, doesn’t comment on the fact that it’s two hundred and forty four seconds, or however long, past when she’s supposed to meet him. He’s in his instructor blacks, which feel suitably ordinary after so much time spent with him in his dress grays and civilian clothes, like they’ve dialed everything back to meeting in uniform over lunch to discuss their work. It’s an immense relief, to be doing something so normal again, to be in such a familiar setting with him as the Academy mess.

“How was the rest of your weekend?” she finally asks, after she’s sat down and pulled her padds out, arranged her stylus, and put her napkin in her lap and he still hasn’t said anything else. She looks up at him to see if he’s even paying attention to her, but she finds she can only raise her gaze as far as the middle of his chest and when she realizes she’s been studying his science insignia for a second too long, quite unable to actually meet his eyes, she quickly picks up her fork and focuses on her salad instead of him sitting there across from her.

“Satisfactory.”

She pushes a carrot towards a small pool of dressing and swirls it around, making a mess on her plate but not particularly caring. “Good. That’s good.”

“Yourself?”

“Fine,” she says, picking at a piece of lettuce. “Did you have a chance to read my outline? I sent you what I worked on.”

“Yes, however I recommend that you expand the section that includes Desai’s analysis. He has a number of other papers which would be suitable resources,” he says smoothly and she wishes she had his preternatural calm about things, his ability to be completely unruffled and composed, rather than how her brain seems to stutter and catch as it has been for days now, on the way Pike grinned at them from his car, on how Taele had been watching them, on how collected Spock had been after-

“Which one would be best?” she asks abruptly, after realizing he’s waiting for her to respond.

“A Prolegomena to the Study of Cardassian Sub-dialects.”

“I’ve never heard of it but I can take a look at it,” she offers, only to see that crease form between his brows.

“You read it for my class last semester.”

“Oh. Right. That’s right. I did.”

“Do you not remember?” he asks and that crease deepens and he just watches her for a long moment. She feels her cheeks heat under the weight of his attention and the heaviness of how he’s looking at her, in that way of his that makes her feel scrutinized.

“No, I do.”

“Did you not gain a full understanding of the topic when you read it?”

“I did, I did.”

“Then I do not understand-“

“Yeah, it’s fine, I’ll include it.”

That earns her a raised eyebrow and his head tips slightly to the side. “You do not wish to argue about it further?” he asks and she thinks that there’s maybe a note of incredulity in his voice, that she would acquiesce so quickly.

“I-“ she starts, trying to get her brain to engage in a debate over whether or not she wants to use more of Desai’s work in her paper, but she can’t seem to actually focus on the topic, not with the way he’s watching at her. “No.”

“I see.”

“Ok, then,” she says. “Great.”

She digs into her salad with more enthusiasm than it deserves and if she’s a bit quieter than she usually is when they meet to discuss their work, it’s not like he has much to say either.

“I can finish going over the Romulan conditional tense tomorrow,” she tells him as she spears the last tomato on her plate. “I don’t know if you’re ready for it for the tutorial, but I just need a couple more hours in the lab and then I’ll be done with it.”

“Very well,” he says, which doesn’t really answer whether or not he needs her to complete it. She’s about to ask him, but when she looks up from her plate she finds herself glancing at his mouth and studiously looks just about anywhere else. That somewhere else ends up being the door, which she is half thinking about leaving through and how nice it would be to be back in her room with Gaila, and not with Spock sitting across from her, and somewhere between imagining the peace and quiet of her own space and thinking about what her summer might have been like if she hadn’t wanted to do this paper, and if she hadn’t ended up doing it with Spock, she realizes that she’s staring blanking at someone approaching them, and when she blinks, that person resolves themselves to be McKenna.

“I thought I might find you here,” he says to her with that smile of his. She gives him a smaller one in return, slightly thrown by him showing up in the middle of her lunch with Spock and walking right over to them without preamble. “Hi, Commander.”

“Lieutenant.”

“How was it taking the Ambassador up to the ship?” he asks, shooting Nyota another quick grin.

“Uneventful.”

McKenna just nods, that same smile pulling at his lips. After a moment of silence, Spock sits up even straighter, if that’s possible, and skewers him with a look Nyota’s seen directed at dozens of students during the semester she was in his class.

“Do you require assistance in some matter?”

“I…” he starts, then pauses to lick his lips, his smile faltering slightly. “Uhura, could I talk to you for a sec?”

She glances over at Spock, but his attention has already returned to his work.

“Sure,” she says and follows McKenna halfway across the mess hall to the salad bar, where he fiddles with a pair of tongs set in a bin of lettuce.

“You having a good summer?”

“It’s alright,” she answers.

“Good, yeah, that’s great.”

She waits a beat but he doesn’t say anything else.

“Yours?” she finally asks.

“Fine, fine. Went down to San Diego with Olson.”

“Ok.”

“We went surfing.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, we did.”

She just nods and finds herself glancing over his shoulder towards Spock who’s still bent over his work. Or not bent over, really, since she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him actually relax, but concentrating on his padd in that way of his, where he just studies something so intently that it seems to take up his entire focus.

McKenna clears his throat and fidgets with the salad tongs again. “So, I didn’t know about you and, uh, the Commander.”

“Oh, we weren’t…” she starts, waving him off in a way that is hopefully more casual than it feels, since it’s a bit strange to her that McKenna really thinks she’s dating Spock. Not that that wasn’t the point, but it’s a bit odd to be so easily believed. “Not then.”

“Ok, good,” he says, nodding. “Good, good. I didn’t want… One of my bosses and all.”

“Of course.”

McKenna nods again, rubbing his hands together and shooting a look over at where Spock’s sitting.

“I just… you and him? Really?”

She feels something in her chest tighten. “Really.”

“Just doesn’t seem like your type,” he says, that smile on his face again and one hip leaning against the edge of the salad bar.

“I’ve got to get back,” she says, pointing at Spock.

“Yeah, hey, good to see you.”

She just gives a small wave, the gesture more abrupt than it might have been.

When she pulls her chair back up to the table and picks up her stylus again, it’s pretty impossible to ignore the way Spock’s watching her.

“What?”

“You two are acquainted.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she assures him, then watches the way his eyes dart to where McKenna’s leaving through the door. She runs her teeth over her bottom lip and bends over her padd and when she speaks again, she doesn’t look up at him. “He asked me out last semester and was just saying that he hoped it wasn’t weird now. That’s all.”

“I see,” Spock says. He’s silent for so long that Nyota’s already highlighted a paragraph and added a note next to it when he speaks again. “I was not aware he had expressed interest in dating you.”

She’s about to quip that she’s not entirely sure the interest really revolved around ‘dating’ per se, but something in Spock’s tone makes her rethink that.

“Well,” she starts, then can’t really figure out how to end that sentence so she settles for studying a filmplast. “The last draft of my outline was fine? If I go back over Desai’s work and include more of it?”

“I said that it was.”

“Right. Great. Then I’m going to start writing the rough draft of the paper itself.”

“Very well.”

“Ok.” Silence hangs thick and heavy between them and she finally puts one padd on top of another, and then a third on top of those two. “I might go work in the library for the afternoon.”

“Of course.”

“See you later, then.”

He just nods and doesn’t look up the entire time she puts her belongings in her bag. If he watches her leave, she wouldn’t know because she doesn’t look back.

…

“Where were you?” Gaila asks that night. “I thought you two were buddy buddy in the mess hall today. I went there to find you.”

“Library. I was writing. Wanted to focus.”

“Hmmm,” Gaila says, hands on her hips as she looks Nyota over.

“Remember that guy at the bar?” Nyota asks, casting about for a conversation topic that isn’t Spock. There’s only been one guy in recent memory, so Gaila quickly nods. “Pilot on the Enterprise.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“No.”

“Yep.”

“That’s…”

“A little awkward,” Nyota supplies. “Kind of weird.”

“I didn’t even know he was in Starfleet.”

“I didn’t even know his name,” Nyota shrugs, sitting on her bed and leaning down to unzip first one boot and then the other. “And he actually thinks Spock and I are dating. Which I guess is good, but it’s… weird.”

But Gaila’s slowly smiling, twirling one red curl around her finger.

“So the last guy that you showed any interest in over the last… year? Two years? Five years? Ten?”

“Oh, shut up. I should have never told you.”

“Works with the Commander,” Gaila continues as if Nyota hadn’t spoken. “Regretting you picked the wrong officer? Because the Commander has the dark and brooding thing down, but what’s his name again?”

“McKenna,” Nyota mutters.

“McKenna,” Gaila says slowly, savoring the word. “He is… well he… that smile… and he can dance, Ny.”

Nyota just ignores Gaila’s continued analysis of McKenna while she pulls off her sweater, unzips her skirt and reaches for a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.

“Adonis? Would that be an apt description?”

“Did you just use the word ‘apt?”

“Focus, Nyota, on men and not on vocabulary. Please.”

“Sorry. I mean, I’m not, but I can pretend to be.”

“Now. Ok. The Commander, though. Taller. Knows big words, which apparently is a necessity for you.”

“You realize that I’m not actually deciding between the two, right? Happily, gleefully single over here.”

“Three times as strong as a human, which ugh, Ny. Come on. Also, there’s basically no way that man isn’t amazing in bed.”

“Gaila…”

“Zero chance.”

“Gaila.”

“And, I heard once that Vulcans have huge-“

“Gaila!”

“Capacities for endurance. What did you think I was going to say?”

“I really don’t need to think about the Commander like that.”

“Also, touch telepathy. Have I sufficiently explained to you the advantages of telepathy? Because I met this Deltan a couple years ago-“

“I got the gist of it,” Nyota interrupts, her tone sharper than she intended. “Sorry, I just meant-“

“What happened?” Gaila asks, her eyes narrowing and Nyota feels her stomach drop.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t ‘nothing’ me, Nyota ‘I pretend to have private business but I really want to talk about it’ Uhura.”

“First of all, you know my middle name. Second, I sometimes don’t want to talk about things.”

“First of all, you totally do want to talk about this. And second – Hey! Stop! Don’t go brush your teeth to get out of this conversation!”

“Too late,” Nyota says, already halfway to the bathroom. “Dental hygiene. You should try it some time.”

“You’re the species with gross teeth! Having to actually brush them because your enzymes don’t just take care of that!” Gaila’s shouting but Nyota drowns it out by closing the door.

It’s not until her teeth are clean, her face washed, and her hair brushed that she goes back into their room, only to find Gaila in her own pajamas, sprawled out on her bed.

“What?” Nyota asks, frowning at the way Gaila’s frowning at her.

“What happened the other night?”

“I ate a ton, it turns out Puri has a great sense of humor, and the Ambassador was, for Terran culture, exceptionally rude. I told you all of this.”

“What else happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing?”

“Nothing,” Nyota confirms, pulling back the blankets on her bed and slipping between them.

“Kind of shocking to see McKenna there?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Awesome to meet Hawkins?”

“Didn’t find a time to talk with him much.”

“You realized that I was right that Pike is totally hot?”

“Uh. He’s not bad looking?”

“He’s no Commander,” Gaila sighs.

“Literally, no, he’s not. He’s a captain,” Nyota says, which gets a much heavier and longer sigh out of her roommate.

“Did you continue to let the Dean know you’re her number one fan girl?”

“I am not. I just think she’s had a pretty incredible career for how young she is. Probably hasn’t been waylaid by terrible roommates over the years, which would have helped. And she and Puri are an adorable couple.”

“Isn’t that so sweet. Interspecies romance at it’s best.”

“It is. You know, despite the Federation and Starfleet’s commitment to diversity and integrating cultures, there’s really so few examples of-“

“Oh, save it. What’d the Commander wear? You never told me all these details, you know. You just came back and were all, ‘fine, it was fine, so fine, super fine, the finest fine that has ever been fine’.”

“Dress grays,” Nyota answers, shooting a glare over at her roommate.

“Pike in a dress uniform. The Commander. McKenna. How did you keep your panties on?”

“Not that difficult, it turns out.”

“You are super human, Nyota ‘I am immune to the attractiveness that is senior officers in their super hot uniforms’ Uhura.”

“They’re colleagues, Gaila, I’m not going to start mooning over them. Lights,” she says, plunging them into the dark.

“You could use some mooning, you know,” Gaila says before Nyota hears her pull her blankets up around herself.

It’s blessedly, wonderfully silent for several long minutes, until Nyota hears Gaila shift against her sheets.

“You two kissed, didn’t you?” Gaila asks into the dark of their room, her voice soft and gentle.

“How do you do that?” Nyota asks, nearly sitting up.

“Oh, stop, I figured it out days ago. So?”

“So what? Also, I hate you.”

“You love me. And what was it like?”

“A kiss?”

“Yeah, what was the kiss like.”

“Like a kiss.”

“No but…” Gaila sighs heavily and Nyota hears her kicking at her blankets. “But what else.”

“Nothing else. It was just a kiss. Not one I’m particularly interested in talking about with you, as it so happens.”

“A good one?”

“I don’t know. It was fine I guess.”

“Fine?”

“Fine.”

“But he’s so hot.”

Nyota remembers the warmth of his fingers, the wash of heat from his face so close to hers.

“Yeah.”

“Lights!”

Nyota presses her palms to her eyes against the sudden glare. “Gaila! C’mon!”

“You admit he’s hot? Finally!”

“No, I meant… I’m going to sleep.”

“I knew it,” Gaila whispers triumphantly after turning off the light again. “I totally knew it.”

Nyota ignores her, rolling over on her side so that she’s facing the wall and pulling the blankets up to her chin despite the relative warmth of the room. She listens to the familiar sounds of Gaila punching at her pillow and twisting this way and that in her sheets, trying to get comfortable in a Terran bed that’s so different than the nest of cushions and blankets she described from her home.

But try as she might to go to sleep, Nyota can’t settle the jump that seems to have taken up permanent residence in her stomach or school the pounding of her heart.

“It’s just weird,” she finally says to the wall and the sounds from Gaila’s bed immediately stop.

“Do you wish it didn’t happen?”

“No, I…” she starts, then stops, staring into the dark. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t think I ever exactly expected any of this. We were just supposed to be meeting for coffee and tea and doing work, not going out to dinner and… ”

Nyota doesn’t finish that sentence and Gaila’s quiet for a long moment, until Nyota hears her hair drag across her pillow as she shifts around again.

“Is the problem that you liked it?”

Nyota lets out a long breath. “I don’t want this to get complicated with him.”

“Nyota, you’re in a fake relationship with your ex-professor, who is half-Vulcan, the XO of the ship you’re determined to be assigned to, and is also your research advisor and you two have already broken up once this summer.”

Nyota huffs out a long breath of air. “We didn’t break up, we were never-“

“It’s complicated,” Gaila declares, going back to kicking at her blankets. “But you’ve always loved a challenge.”

…

“You’re the one working on this?” Commander Ho asks when she finds Nyota bent over a console in the linguistics lab.

“Sorry, sir?” Nyota asks, straightening and blinking, trying to focus on the Commander, rather than the screen she’s been staring at for hours now.

“I heard Commander Spock was helping a cadet configure a new language tutorial, but didn’t hear who exactly he was working with,” Ho says, coming to stand behind Nyota in order to stare over her shoulder at the monitor. “Looks like you’re making good progress, these are tough to do especially since I don’t think you’ve done one before, right?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“Of course I’m not surprised that you’re the one working with the Commander,” Ho says, walking around Nyota’s chair and leaning against the edge of the monitor so that they’re face to face and Nyota can see the small smile playing over the other woman’s mouth. “He’s your advisor on your paper too? After Carrick transferred?”

“Yes he is.”

“And that’s going well?”

“Yes, sir, very much so.”

“Good, good,” Ho says, nodding. She gives Nyota another small smile, then draws in a breath and pauses before speaking again. “And I have to ask. You two weren’t… when you were in his class?”

“What?” Nyota asks, blinking up at her. “Working together? We started both projects this summer.”

“I don’t think the two of you would, of course,” Ho says quickly. “But as department head I have to know.”

“Know what?” Nyota asks.

“If you were, ah, seeing him while you were still his student.”

“What?” Nyota repeats, then draws in a deep, short breath, feeling her perception of the conversation reorient. She never would have thought that Ho of all people would have found out about what was going on with her and Spock and maybe it makes sense as he teaches in the department, but she’s not on the Enterprise and Nyota doesn’t think Ho has ever seen them together, and the idea of this ruse actually working well enough that she would have heard about them makes her head spin. Ho seems separate from everything that’s going on with Spock this summer, a professor and officer Nyota knows from her own work, as if her real life should be able to resume when she’s not with him, as if she should be able to step right back into the Xenolinguistics department with no consequence of having spent the summer with Spock.

“I’m sorry to have to ask,” Ho is saying and Nyota realizes she still hasn’t answered the question, has been to busy thinking about the fact that she doesn’t like how she and Spock have done such a good job that Ho actually believes the fallacy, not when the entire thing is a fabrication and now the other woman legitimately thinks they’re an item, when she never should have known about any of this in the first place.

“We weren’t seeing each other during the semester,” Nyota finally gets out, not mentioning the part where they’re not really, technically, seeing each other at the moment, either. Except that they are. Ostensibly.

“Of course you weren’t,” Ho says quickly, looking maybe a bit relieved, and then gives Nyota a small smile. “And you’re definitely not the first couple to get together like that, the minute finals are over, you know. Gives you something else to look forward to at the end of a long semester right?” Ho asks with a grin.

“I, uh…” Nyota starts, then just presses her lips together and nods.

“And I’m happy for you two,” Ho continues, pushing off the console and standing again.

“Thanks,” Nyota says, after trying and failing to find anything better to say.

“He’s a great guy, as you obviously know,” Ho says and Nyota just mutely nods. The other woman pauses, then her smile grows. “I want to – No, never mind.”

“Is there something can I help you with, sir?”

“I want to ask all about it,” Ho says in a rush, then holds up both hands and shakes her head. “But I can’t, I won’t.”

“About…” Nyota echoes, then blinks. “Oh, about-“

“None of my business,” Ho says firmly.

“It’s not…” Nyota starts, finding herself floundering for words in a way that she never does around Ho, since she’s easy to talk to, and is a great department head, and because they’re normally talking about classes or work and not the story of how she and Spock purportedly started dating. “It’s not that interesting, honestly,” she tells the other woman because the amount of tea they drink and having lunch is really pretty boring, even if she can feel her neck flush, feel her skin prick with warmth like it did when he took a step closer to her in the quiet outside her dorm and-

“Good luck with the rest of your work today, Uhura, let me know if you need anything, I’ll be in my office,” Ho is saying and Nyota makes herself nod, wondering if she’s missed part of what the Commander was telling her, but she’s unable to shake the fuzziness that has suddenly set up residence in her brain in order to figure it out.

“Yes, sir,” she answers quickly, waiting for Ho to leave before letting out a long breath she didn’t know she was holding, a small knot of concern forming in her stomach.

Her face feels a little warm and her mind feels like it won’t stop racing, her thoughts churning over how Ho legitimately thinks she and Spock are together. Dating. Seeing each other. In a relationship. And that they really, truly like each other. Find each other attractive. Want to spend time in each other’s company, get along well, probably talk all the time. And were waiting until the end of the semester like it couldn’t come soon enough, likely counting down the days until they could be together.

She drops her head to her palm and closes her eyes, and it takes a long time to settle her thoughts enough that she can return to her work.

…

“Free food, this should be an obvious choice,” Gaila says, hands on her hips and both eyebrows raised. “Aren’t you like some type of genius?”

“I also now have two simultaneous projects going on this summer.”

“And I’m sure you couldn’t be happier,” Gaila responds, leaning over Nyota and stacking up her padds full of Romulan and mixing them in with her padds of research for her paper.

“Hey! I just got those organized!”

“And you can organize them again later, I’m doing you a favor, really, since I know how much you love rearranging things on your desk until they’re perfectly perfect.”

“That’s not-“

“And the other favor I’m doing for you after a long hard day of you working is getting you food, that is free, and not made in the mess hall.”

“But I don’t-“

“You can thank me later,” Gaila promises.

“Where are we even going?” Nyota asks when Gaila’s dragged her all the way over to HQ and through the maze of buildings there.

“It’s this thing I found out about,” Gaila says, stopping abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk and squinting at the buildings next to them. “Over here.”

The building is one of Starfleet’s reception halls and the room in it that Gaila leads them into is completely packed with officers and other staff members, plus a handful of other cadets so maybe she and Gaila aren’t the only students who are at the Academy over the summer, bored and seeking out a nicer dinner than what the mess offers.

“What is this for?” Nyota asks, trying to keep up with Gaila, who has started into the crowd and is pushing her way towards a table laden with food.

“Yum,” Gaila declares, rubbing her hands together and staring at all the food, her eyes wide. “Wow. Yum yum yum.”

“What is this for, really?” Nyota asks. “And how exactly do you know about this?”

“Is that… is that a fountain of chocolate?” Gaila breathes, her hand tight around Nyota’s upper arm as she pulls on her in order to get closer to it. “Is that… real?”

“I think so. Gaila, where are we?”

“Standing in front of… this,” Gaila says, her eyes wide. “Think I can get a cup? We need a cup. Now. Quickly. As soon as possible. Super ASAP.”

“Gaila…”

“It’s the recommissioning of the Farragut, Captain Hill just got given command and now we’re at the party. And we need a cup.”

“Who?”

“Captain Hill,” Gaila says, slowly, drawing out the syllables. “Cup, cup, cup, Ny.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Her. Super hot. Also her wife is like… ugh, Ny, she’s like… I just…” Gaila lets out a long, wistful sigh. “Puts the Commander to shame, I’m telling you. She is just.-“

“I get the picture.”

“But did you get a cup?”

“You’re not supposed to use a cup,” Nyota says, pointing to the fruit and small cookies set on the table. “Use those. No- no, Gaila, not your finger, just-“

“This is so good!”

“Do you need a napkin?”

“You have to try this Ny, it’s better than sex. Well, some sex. I mean, not sex with me but how I imagine sex is like when I’m not involved.”

“I’m going to get you a napkin,” Nyota says, but when she turns towards the end of the table to retrieve one, she nearly runs right into Stoyer. “Sir,” she says automatically, trying to cover her surprise at seeing the Dean there.

“Uhura, fancy seeing you here,” Stoyer says with a wide smile.

“Nice to see you again,” Nyota says, trying to find the right words even though she feels slightly thrown from being at a party with so many senior staff, and now that she’s spent so much time with Spock, senior staff that she actually knows. And who know her. And say hi to her since it’s only been a handful of days since they were out at a dinner together and as great as it is for her career to get to know the Dean or not, Nyota has a fleeting, wistful longing for how anonymous she used to be in such a crowd.

“I’m Gaila,” Gaila says, sticking out her– thankfully clean – hand for Stoyer to shake. “I have very proudly never been called into your office.”

“Hello. And congratulations on that, I suppose.”

“A couple close calls,” Gaila admits in a whisper.

“I’m sure I don’t want to know,” Stoyer says quickly. “Uhura, Puri just got here.”

Nyota just nods slowly, unsure of why Stoyer just told her that. “Ok.”

“He said the meeting with Pike was a lot longer than they thought it’d be.”

“Right.”

“I think they were reviewing the availability of Spacedock’s construction crews, since the Hood just docked for repairs,” Stoyer continues. “Though I’m sure Spock’s told you all about it.”

“He hasn’t mentioned it,” Nyota says before she thinking that maybe it would have been better to be silent about the matter, rather than suggest that they don’t actually talk about their days or what’s going on with their work.

But Stoyer just laughs. “I might be jealous, Puri won’t stop about how they haven’t finished putting together Sickbay. You don’t have to hear about every single nuance of the ship each and every time you and Spock have a conversation?”

“We don’t-“ she starts, then stops herself from saying that she really hasn’t seen much of him lately. Not since the past weekend at dinner, and then that lunch when McKenna ran into them, and then the last few days when they’ve sent a couple messages back and forth, but other than that she hasn’t exactly sought him out and he hasn’t suggested getting together either.

“They’re always talking about verbs,” Gaila says quickly. “Boring, right?”

“Well, never thought I’d get tired of hearing about the Enterprise, but there you have it,” Stoyer says. “I think they went to get a drink.”

“Sorry?” Nyota asks when Stoyer seems to be waiting for her to say something. “What?”

“Puri and Spock went to get a drink. Or, well, Puri went to get one and they can’t seem to be more than five feet from each other whenever they’re together, so Spock went too.”

It still takes her another moment to process that she’s probably expected to react to that news, and then a long beat before she realizes that she’s supposed to be excited about the fact that he’s there.

“Great, great,” she says, probably too quickly. “I didn’t know that he was even-”

“We just got here too,” Gaila says, speaking over her. “Someone had to finish her work. And that obviously wasn’t me.”

“What dedication,” Stoyer says with a smile.

“No wonder the Commander likes her, right?” Gaila adds with a wide grin. “Two legumes in the same capsule.”

“I don’t know what that-“

“Hi!” Gaila says to someone standing behind Nyota, interrupting Stoyer, who is left with a slightly puzzled look on her face, and then Spock is standing right there next to Nyota, holding a glass of what looks like water, and when he looks at her, his expression threatens towards something like surprise before it’s completely blank again.

“Hi,” she says and realizes only belatedly that she should probably be happier to see him.

“I’m Gaila,” Gaila says to Puri, holding out her hand to hjm and grinning when he shakes it.

“This is Gaila,” Nyota confirms, then shakes herself and tries to remember what’s supposed to happen next in a normal conversation, a conversation where fake boyfriends don’t appear out of the crowd at parties her terrible roommate made her go to. “Gaila, this is Doctor Puri.”

“If Orions and Andorians had babies, what color would they be?” Gaila asks him.

“I’m – I’m married,” he says, pointing at Stoyer.

“I didn’t ask you if you were married, I asked what color the babies would be. Not our babies, obviously.”

“I-“

“Aren’t you a doctor?”

“Teal?” Puri asks.

“Is that a question?”

“I don’t… know?”

“I was not anticipating your attendance,” Spock says, quietly, so that neither Stoyer nor Puri seem to notice or to hear him.

“I wasn’t either,” she says, nodding her chin towards Gaila. “I’m here under duress.”

“Truly?”

“No.”

“I do not understand.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, not feeling like explaining. “I admit, I didn’t really think this was your scene.”

“Pardon?”

“That you liked parties,” she corrects.

“I do not.”

“Then why are you here?” she asks him.

“Captain Hill was my classmate at the Academy.”

“I thought you weren’t friends with any humans.”

“I am not.”

“Then why …” She lets out a long breath of air and crosses her arms. She glances at the others, then up at Spock and drops her voice even further.

“I think Stoyer expected me to know that you were coming to this,” she says and only realizes she’s been chewing on the inside of her lip when it starts to hurt.

“I had not thought to inform you of that fact,” Spock says and Nyota just shrugs.

“Well, it’s not like I did either,” she says, trying to remember what it was like to have a boyfriend, how much she would really tell him about her day and what she was up to. A lot, she thinks, but she can’t really remember, and wonders if she would have invited him to come with her to something like this. Yes, probably, which just makes he sigh again, this time in Gaila’s general direction for forcing her out of their room. She reaches out and touches her roommate’s shoulder, thinking that maybe she should be trying to talk to Spock longer, but it’s not her fault that he showed up at a party that Gaila dragged her to. “Hey, I’m going to go get a drink.”

“I’m coming!” Gaila says quickly, waving a cheerful goodbye to Stoyer and Puri.

“White wine,” Nyota tells the bartender when they make they’ve made their way across the room to the bar.

“You’re in a bad mood,” Gaila informs her after ordering her own drink. “And look at all these delicious officers here. How can you be so grumpy?”

“I’m not grumpy,” Nyota says, taking her wineglass from one of the bartender’s tentacles. “I just want to be back in our room working.”

“You have been grumpy all week,” Gaila corrects. She digs an elbow into Nyota’s arm and gestures towards a knot of men. “Wow. Let’s go say hi. They could cheer anyone up.”

“No, I-“ Nyota starts, sparing them only a glance before starting to tell Gaila that she doesn’t want to. Then she looks at them again and sighs. “Gaila, I can’t.”

“Why not? We’re just going to talk. Or you’re just going to talk, I’m going to hopefully do more than that.”

“Because,” she says, nodding her head back towards where they left Spock.

“Well want to go talk to him, then?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she says again.

“That’s not an answer, Nyota ‘I have a vocabulary that’s too big to even be useful’ Uhura.”

“It’s weird.”

“What’s weird? Teal Orion Andorian babies? Because that’s not weird, that’s awesome,” Gaila says, taking a long sip from her drink.

“They think we’re dating. Puri and Stoyer, and McKenna, too. And Commander Ho.”

“So?”

“No, they really, really think we’re actually dating. As in Stoyer thinks that Spock and I talk all the time and Ho was talking about how we were waiting for the end of the semester to get together and McKenna was really uncomfortable about it.”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes? I guess?”

“So what’s the problem?”

Nyota stares down into her glass, swirling the liquid around this way and then that before she takes a small sip.

“I think I want all of this to be over.”

“Over? That’s a change in tune from last week, Nyota ‘I’m going to become best friends with every officer ever’ Uhura." Gaila reaches out and pokes her arm, like she can determine what has possibly gone wrong, which makes Nyota just take another sip of wine and press her lips together.

“That was before everything.”

“Everything?” Gaila echoes. “Do I need to start carrying your thesaurus around for you? Use specifics, Nyota ‘I know every word-“

“It feels a little bit rude, to lead them on like that,” she interrupts.

“Well it is,” Gaila shrugs and Nyota frowns at her.

“C’mon, Gaila, say something to make me feel better.”

“You’re kind of making this whole thing up,” Gaila says, shrugging again, then tipping her head to the side in a way that makes her look so much like Spock that Nyota half wants to just walk away. “But, then again, the Commander is totally hot and I know that you know that, and you two totally made out-“

“We didn’t,” Nyota hisses, unable to help but glance around quickly to see if anyone heard that. “Gaila! It was basically nothing.”

“No ‘nothing’ of a kiss has ever thrown you this off kilt-“

“-Kilter-“

“-Before.”

“I should never have told you,” Nyota says into her wineglass, taking a long sip from it.

“But you did,” Gaila says with a huge grin. “And I’m so happy about it. You two smooching, not you not telling me, which you should have done that night, with like a priority one comm call, or by sprinting across campus to tell me the news, or waiting up all night for me to get home. This stuff is important, Ny.”

“People are now going have always thought we dated,” Nyota says, sighing into her wineglass and ignoring her roommate. “Even when classes start again, and next semester and next year and-“

“Wow, the entire Academy is not on the comms talking about you and Commander Cutie Cake, you two are not as interesting as you think you are.”

“Pie. Or pants, Gaila, not cake.”

“But you can decorate cakes so that they’re cute,” Gaila frowns. “Like a kitten cake. Or with rats and spiders. Adorable.”

“What if I don’t want everyone to know that I dated the Commander for a couple months?” Nyota asks. “This will have always happened, he’ll be my ex and people will know that and I don’t know how long this is going to drag on and-”

“-So what, some other tall, dark and handsome officer is going to come along, who’s also a genius and is an expert in your chosen field and can talk about conjugations and parts of speech until the bovines return to their domiciles? And he’s going to care that you dated the Commander? Maybe you should have thought about that when you came up with this whole plan.”

“Me? My plan? Did you forget that you were the one to-“

“Oh, look,” Gaila says, standing on her toes to peer over the crowd. “Your favorite person ever!”

“If you’re talking about Spock again, he’s not-“

“The Ambassador,” Gaila says gleefully. “And look, Captain Pike – wow he’s so hot! Let’s go say hi!”

“No,” Nyota groans, but Gaila’s hand is firm on her arm and before Nyota can even start to put up a fight, she’s halfway across the room and Gaila’s trying to shake the Ambassador’s hand.

“No,” Taele says loudly, taking a step backwards.

“Shucks. Shoot. Whichever. I’m Gaila,” she says, turning to Pike and shaking his hand instead, his expression somewhere between bemused at Gaila’s enthusiasm and strained whenever he looks at the Ambassador.

“Nice to see you again,” Pike says, giving Nyota a small smile.

“You as well, sir,” she answers and can’t help but notice that Puri has his hand on Stoyer’s back and that Spock is on their other side and she thinks that maybe she should walk over there and stand next to him but she doesn’t find herself moving to actually do that.

“We were just explaining this type of party to the Ambassador,” Pike says. “And – ah, there you are!” Pike has a genuine grin on his face, wide enough that it makes his eyes shine as he embraces a woman who’s a good head shorter than Nyota, clapping her on the back and then holding her at arm’s length. “Congratulations, Captain.”

“Thank you,” the other woman responds. “I’m glad you could make it, all of you.”

“I’m Gaila,” Gaila says, holding out her hand again.

“Hill,” the other woman responds.

“Captain Hill,” Puri corrects, stepping around Stoyer to give the new captain a hug of his own. “Look at you, so important these days, and to think that during second year you-“

“Can I now order you to never repeat anything we got up to that year?” Hill asks, squeezing Puri tightly before stepping back.

“Yes, sir,” he replies smartly. “Of course, sir, very good, sir.”

“Congratulations,” Spock says quietly and Hill gives him a wide smile.

“Thanks, Commander. Any chance you want to jump ship and join the Farragut’s crew? We could use you, you know.”

“No poaching my staff so soon,” Pike says, slinging his arm over Hill’s shoulders and smacking her on the back again.

“You are tolerable,” Taele says, cutting into the conversation and skewering Hill with that piercing stare.

“Sorry, I’m what?” Hill asks, blinking up at her.

“Long story,” Pike says, shaking his head. “This is Ambassador Taele, from Saiph Prime. And you know Arlene of course-“

“So happy for you,” Stoyer adds quickly and Hill grins at her.

“And this is Cadet Uhura,” Pike continues. “Spock’s girlfriend.”

That introduction makes her bristle, the thought that she’s being presented as someone’s significant other making something tighten in her chest, but she puts on a smile and holds out her hand.

“Congratulations,” she says and Hill shakes her hand enthusiastically.

“So, so nice to meet you, Uhura,” she says, grinning back and forth between Nyota and Spock. “Wow. That’s so great.”

Nyota tries to imagine if she were really with Spock, if she was standing next to him and maybe leaning into him like Stoyer is with Puri, if her smile at being introduced as his girlfriend was real and not forced, if she was thrilled to be there with him, but all she can think about is someday applying to work on the Farragut, or meeting Hill again years from now, and the other woman thinking that she had actually dated Spock.

That thought makes her slip behind Puri and Stoyer and catch Spock’s eye when he glances at her.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” she asks.

He follows her into the crowd, far enough away from the rest of the group that they can’t be overheard, the conversations around them rising and falling and becoming indistinct, so that it’s a wall of white noise to shield their conversation.

“This is weird,” she declares, gripping her wineglass and staring up at him.

“Pardon?”

“I don’t like this.”

“What, specifically?

She glances back at where everyone’s still talking, Gaila gesturing wildly and Puri saying something that makes everyone but Taele laugh. “They all think we’re dating.”

“Was that not our goal?”

She lets out a long breath and crosses her arms. “I think I’m realizing that pretending to date an officer in Starfleet involves people in Starfleet actually thinking I’m dating an officer.”

“That was unclear?” he asks slowly, his eyebrow starting to rise and she wants to reach up and press it back down, wants to bury her face in her hand, wants to walk out of the crowded room, head to her dorm, and never look back.

“I didn’t want anyone to actually know,” she tries to explain.

“You were the one who suggested I tell my colleagues. And you also suggested attending the dinner.”

“But still,” she says and she’s a linguist and should be able to come up with a better explanation but she can’t, not right then, can’t find the words to express the strange knot of anxiety and disquiet that has lodged somewhere deep in her gut for days now.

“Those words used in conjunction with each other are illogical.”

“No, I mean yes. Look, they all-“ she says, gesturing to the room at large. “They all think- and Commander Ho, too, and now Captain Hill and-“

“You do not wish them to know that you and I are seeing each other?”

“I just feel bad for all of them, like we’re leading them on,” she finally says softly, raising one shoulder towards her ear. “Like it’s not fair to them, that they think this is real between us and…” She trails off and shrugs again, staring somewhere past him and swallowing, hard.

“I see.”

“I know I said we weren’t going to lie, back when we started all of this, and I haven’t, I don’t think, but this really blew up, a lot, and more and more people know and-“

“What does it mean to ‘blow up?’ Is it a violent occurrence?”

“Expand. Get bigger.”

“Ah.” She watches the way he looks at her closely for a long moment, his attention on her heavy and focused before he speaks again. “You are quite troubled.”

“I’m fine,” she says, then closes her eyes for a moment and tries to take a deep breath, but it’s hard to do. “I just don’t want this to become more complicated than it is already.”

It’s vague, maybe too vague for him to understand, but instead of raising an eyebrow or doing that thing where he tips his head to the side like a giant, half Vulcan question mark, he surprises her by just nodding.

“I agree.”

“You do?” she asks, slightly taken aback.

“While I do not share your assertion regarding the incongruous nature of our associates’ assumptions-“

“-You can just use the word ‘weird’, Spock-“

“-If you do not want to complicate matters, then neither do I.”

“Ok,” she nods. “Good. Thanks.”

“Of course.”

She finds herself squinting up at him. “Are you being nice to me?”

“I am being logical. ”

“Oh.” She takes a small sip of her wine and studies it for a long moment, and when she looks up at him again she feels something ease between them.

When they rejoin the others, she’s standing right next to him, Puri on her other side and crowded close enough that she has to be careful to maintain a couple inches between her and Spock. It’s still warm in the room and the heat and the lull of the conversation has her mind drifting towards things other than the conversation, has her thinking of how relieved she is that she and Spock seem to be on the same page. She feels immeasurably better, better than she has in days, really, ever since she woke up on Sunday morning with the half remembered feeling of the warmth of his skin, the coolness of the night air, the way he-

“Sorry?” Nyota asks when she realizes Hill’s been talking to her and she hasn’t been listening in the slightest.

“I was saying that it’ll be so much fun,” Hill says, sounding like she’s repeating herself. “And Pike’s place is so nice.”

“What will be so much fun?” Nyota asks, looking around for clarification, but everyone else seems to understand what’s going on, even Gaila, who’s giving Nyota a slow grin, her eyes bright and shining.

“This weekend,” Stoyer says. “I can’t wait.”

“This weekend?” Nyota repeats.

“You will attend,” Taele informs her and Spock, leaving the Commander’s eyebrow half raised and Nyota squinting in confusion.

“I’m sorry,” Nyota says, blinking up at Spock for an answer, but he’s just staring between the Ambassador and Pike, unmoving and silent.

“Yourselves, as well as Doctor Puri and Dean Stoyer will attend,” Taele continues, throwing a haughty, disapproving look at Pike, her robes swishing around her in indignation that the captain still seems to be single. “Captain Hill, you are welcome to come as well, along with your wife.”

“I wish,” Hill sighs. “But duty calls.”

“You are not joined,” the Ambassador says to Gaila, who just shrugs.

“Nope, I’m not.”

“And are therefore not invited.”

“Shucks. Shoot. Which is it, Ny? Is using one better than the other? And whatever, I have plans for this weekend.”

“I don’t understand,” Nyota says slowly, looking around at everyone.

“I mentioned having the bridge crew out to my place in Mojave and the Ambassador thought it would be a great idea, especially after that lovely dinner. She’s really excited,” Pike explains tightly, looking like he’s forcing a smile. “And your presence, Cadet, has been… requested. Vehemently.”

“The cadet is currently occupied by completing a rough draft of her project,” Spock says smoothly.

“I have my paper,” she confirms, glancing up at him and giving him a tiny smile in thanks.

“You will attend,” Taele says.

“Bring it,” Pike suggests.

“You must attend,” Taele adds. “You have no choice in the matter.”

“We need to complete our work on the Romulan language tutorial,” Spock says.

“Now that’s dedication,” Stoyer grins. “But c’mon you two, we want to hang out with you both.”

“Your focus should be on each other, not on your work,” Taele says, her dark eyes flicking back and forth between Nyota and Spock in a way that makes her want to shrink away, but the only place to go in the crowd is closer to him.

“Isn’t that sweet?” Puri grins. “Country air, a chance to escape your padds and filmplasts…”

“We don’t-“ Nyota starts.

“I do not believe that-“ Spock begins.

“You two are coming,” Pike informs them in a tone that brokers no argument and in that moment Nyota fully understands why he is the one person that Kirk listens to.

Nyota feels a pit opening inside her stomach, feels that gaping yawning inside of herself, feels like she’s reeling, her head spinning and no words coming that will explain that she and Spock really, really can’t do this, that it was never the plan, that she was never supposed to be at a crowded party with him, never supposed to have so many people actually think they’re together, never supposed to have stood outside her dorm with him, had him bend down and-

There’s a hand on her shoulder and she thinks it must be Gaila, but it’s Spock touching her and it’s so sudden and foreign that she barely keeps herself from twitching away. But his touch is warm and firm and the longer his hand stays there the more if feels like it’s the one unyielding thing in the room, like he’s the only other person in this with her, the only other one who’s going through the exact same thing she is.

“ _I-_ “ she starts, and only realizes she’s said it in Vulcan when he responds in kind. “ _No, Spock, we’re not doing this. We need a reason to stay here._ ”

“ _We perhaps should consider alternative paths to avoid such a weekend than just the fact of other commitments,_ ” he says quietly.

“ _What do you suggest?_ ” she asks, trying to calm the jump in her stomach and the way her palm is sweating on her wineglass. This entire evening, the whole day – or week, really – has been too much and standing there with all of his coworkers, and with Captain Hill and the Ambassador, and Gaila who seems unwilling to invent some type of wild, scarcely believable scenario to help her out, is just making it that much worse.

“ _Unclear_.”

“ _That is not helpful, Spock._ ”

“ _I apologize._ ”

She turns slightly farther away from the group, which brings her closer to him but that seems preferable to having to see how everyone’s watching them, and serves to alleviate some of the fear growing in the back of her mind that some of them might have taken more than Intro to Vulcan.

“ _Perhaps I can become ill._ ”

“ _That would be deceitful._ ”

“ _Not if I find a walk in freezer somewhere, or head down to the infectious diseases wing of Starfleet Medical._ ”

“ _That would be ill-advised._ ”

“ _Was that supposed to be amusing?_ ” she asks, blinking up at him.

“ _Pardon?_ ”

“ _You said ill- It is of no consequence,_ ” she says quickly, shaking her head. “ _Perhaps we can tell the Ambassador and the Captain that we need to think about it and tell them at a later time._ ”

“ _I believe that it is incumbent upon me to inform you that Captain Pike can be quite willful._ ”

“ _As in we have no real choice?_ ” she asks and has to resist raising her hand to dig her fingers into temples.

“ _Not without arousing suspicion,_ ” he says. “ _I must point out that avoiding such a weekend will not lead them to change their opinion that we are in a relationship._ ”

“ _I am aware. But we could just stop everything and give up_ ,” she points out.

“ _Is that what you wish?_ ”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. As much as she wants this to be over, ending all of it doesn’t exactly seem like the best choice. “ _No. I have my paper and you need those crystals._ ”

She thinks he hesitates for just a moment, like he does sometimes when he’s speaking Standard and is choosing what words to use. “ _Then there is one other option._ ”

“ _Shoot._ ”

“ _That phrase does not translate to-_ “

“ _Spock_.”

“ _Perhaps he best way to extract ourselves from this situation may be to accomplish our goals as soon as possible. It does not satisfy your desire to avoid complication, nor to reduce the duplicity regarding the nature of our relationship, but it may serve to bring a more rapid end to this arrangement._ ”

She blinks up at him and it takes her a minute to find her voice.

“ _You suggest that we increase our efforts as a means of convincing the Ambassador to distribute the dilithium more quickly?_ ” she asks, unsure that she heard him right, and even if she did, if he’s really suggesting what she thinks he is. “ _I thought we just agreed that we wished to avoid complication._ ”

“ _We did._ ”

“ _This does not exactly fall within those parameters._ ”

“ _It would be the most logical solution._ ”

“ _It is a terrible idea._ ”

“ _Would you like to suggest a different one?_ ”

“ _Invent a time machine?_ ”

“ _Perhaps I should have specified that you would need to provide a practical solution._ ”

She takes a deep breath and makes herself pause long enough to think it through, trying to imagine a weekend with his colleagues, and Pike, and the Ambassador, but her mind is drawing an enormous blank whenever she attempts to conjure up an image of what that might be like.

Instead, she thinks about the weight of his hand on her, like an anchor against the discomfort of being in a crowded room of people who think they’re together, like he’s steadying her against everything that’s been so complicated lately.

“ _We can go_ ,” she says with a sigh, when she realizes she can’t think of a reason not to go besides her own discomfort. And she got herself – and him – into this mess and she might as well see it through to the end and the sooner that comes, the better.

“ _You are certain?_ ”

“ _I am, it is fine_ ,” she says, then can’t help but pause, and feeling herself wanting to smile, just a little, because she always forgets the way that ‘fine’ in Vulcan translates to Standard as ‘satisfactory’ and ‘suitable’ and ‘acceptable’ and ‘adequate’, along with a host of other words Spock always seems to be using.

“ _Very well._ ”

Everyone’s looking at them and she wonders how it must seem, his hand still on her and them speaking quietly in another language, their heads bowed towards each other like they’re making a quiet, separate space for themselves in the middle of a loud, crowded room.

“Ok,” she says in Standard, nodding up at him, then at Pike. “We’ll come, we’re looking forward to it,” she makes herself say, unsure of where to look since she suddenly realizes how close she is to Spock, and it suddenly seems like his hand has been on her for longer than just a few moments and she wonders if he’s going to move it, or when, and it feels hard to focus, like she can’t both think about the way he’s touching her and the conversation at the same time.

“Wonderful,” Pike says.

“Great,” Puri grins.

“You will not bring your work,” Taele informs them.

“Wow,” Gaila breathes and she looks more excited than she did about the chocolate fountain. “This is the best, ever.”

“As I said earlier, you are not invited to attend,” Taele says quickly, skewering Gaila with a look that suggests just how horrified the Ambassador would be to spend a weekend with someone so blatantly and fragrantly single.

“Oh, no, I don’t need to,” Gaila says with a wide smile. “But this is just going to be so, so incredible, right Ny?”

“Of course,” she says dully, then realizes that if they’re going to get the crystals any sooner, she’s going to have to start acting the part. Not her first choice, but the only way out of this mess seems to be to see it through to the other side, so she makes herself step closer to Spock, close enough that she can feel the heat of his body wash over her. “So much fun. Can’t wait. Really.”


	11. Chapter 11

“You excited?” Gaila asks, sitting on her bed and practically bouncing up and down.

“It’ll be fine, I guess,” Nyota says as she folds her socks. It’s what she’s been telling herself all morning as she very slowly packs, even though she’s not quite ready to even admit to herself that this is really happening. “It’s just two nights.”

“Two completely awesome nights. And it is going to be so, so much better than ‘fine’,” Gaila says and this time she does bounce, just a little. 

“You could have helped me out, you know. Come up with some reason why I had to stay on campus this weekend.”

“Like you don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want to go, exactly. I have many, many other things I’d rather be doing. Practically anything, in fact. It’s going to be a huge pain to keep this charade up for days at a time.”

“They already think you’re in love forever and ever,” Gaila grins and Nyota squeezes her eyes shut.

“Do you think they really think that?”

“Well, that you’re at least doing it.”

“God, Gaila, stop, please. It’s not even like that, you know that, and what would be better is if they knew that.”

“They don’t know that,” Gaila says gleefully, clapping her hands together. “They think you and the Commander are knocking shoes.”

“Boots.”

“But what if you’re wearing shoes?” Gaila asks. “Or even sandals? Because then-“

“I just wish that this had all turned out differently,” Nyota says as she stuffs her socks into her duffle bag. “I never, ever wanted this many people to know.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s way, way more dishonest than just having the Ambassador know?”

“But why, why?”

“Because it comes a lot closer to lying?”

“But why, why, why?”

“Because they believe this huge fallacy about us, this entire situation that doesn’t even exist?”

“But why, why-“

“You can’t just keep adding them, Gaila.”

“I’m just trying to figure exactly how deep your denial goes.”

“What does that even mean?” Nyota asks as she tries to decide if she wants to bring running shorts.

“Are you worried about them or yourself actually thinking that this is a thing?”

“What? Them, obviously,” she says, folding her shorts and grabbing a sports bra out of the drawer. “Of course them. Why?”

“Cause I’m trying to guess if you’re going to be packing lingerie or a chastity belt.”

“What?”

“Come on,” Gaila says with a wide grin.

“Come on what?”

“You two, a weekend with Pike and the entire senior staff…”

“So?”

“At his house out in Mojave…”

“And?”

“Everyone thinks you’re dating.”

“What’s your point?”

“Have you really not figured this out yet?”

“Figured what out, exactly?”

“You haven’t realized you’re going to be sharing a room with him?”

“We’re not-“ Nyota starts before Gaila’s words can sink in. “Oh.”

“Oh yes, Nyota Uhura, oh yes.”

“Shit.”

“No, not shit, amazingness. Incredibleness. Awesomeness. The best-ness ever, that’s ever been.”

“I-“ Nyota starts, staring down at her duffle bag, at her favorite t-shirt in her hand, the one she always runs in if it’s clean, at her socks, so ordinary and unexceptional a moment ago, and then down at the neatly folded underwear sitting next to them. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No, no, no.”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“I – We – This isn’t-“

“Breathe,” Gaila instructs. “And choose better bras, seriously, Ny, you can’t pack those.”

“I– “Nyota starts again, and then does breathe, sucks in a deep, long breath and lets it back out again, trying to still the way her stomach is suddenly jumping around, like it’s ready to leap right past her heart and up into her throat. She forces herself to calm down, wishes for some of that composure that Spock always seems to have as she tries to sort through – and past – the image of having to share a room with him. 

A bed. 

“You know what?” Nyota says abruptly, dropping her shirt over her underwear so she doesn’t have to look at them and similarly erasing the image of Spock and their sleeping arrangements from her mind. “It’ll be fine. We’re professionals.”

“Fine? No, it’ll be salacious and hopefully full of debauchery and -“

“-Gaila, we are Starfleet officers,” she says, glaring at her. She grabs her sweatpants out of her drawer, since she’s suddenly feeling like the more layers she can possibly sleep in the better. “Aren’t there hundreds of stories of being trapped in escape pods, or forced to share a tent, or dozens of other scenarios that people of opposite – or the same I might add – genders get themselves into? Our careers are varied and unpredictable and with so many unexplored planets and unfamiliar customs, platonically sharing a bed is really not a big deal. If that even happens. I have no idea what Pike’s place is like.”

“I am entirely certain that in each one of those scenarios you just described, it ended with some pretty hot and heavy sex.” 

“Oh just shut up.”

“Mmmm. Escape pod. I have to remember that one.”

Nyota’s pretty much wishing for an escape pod about ten minutes into the drive.

Spock is completely silent, which for him is saying something. Beyond greeting her so rotely that he may have been reciting from a book of Terran manners, he hasn’t even looked at her once. In turn, she’s spent the time staring out the window as the city fades behind them and wondering if Spock would kick her out of the car if she suggested turning on music.

“So I got a good start on the draft of my paper,” she finally tells the dashboard.

“That is to be expected.”

“Yeah, guess so.” She crosses her legs one way and then the other, then wishes she had thought to look up how long the drive is, then thinks about asking and then decides not to. “So it’s pretty hot in Mojave, right? That’ll be a nice treat for you.”

“It is hardly comparable to Vulcan’s climate.”

“Oh.” She spends the next ten minutes staring around the inside of the car, trying to identify why Pike thought it was so great and summarily failing. It’s nice, for sure, and really clean, but more than anything it’s just strange to be in a car again after so many years of either walking around San Francisco or taking public transit. And then, without any actual permission from her brain, curiosity wells up in her and before she can stop herself, she blurts out, “Why do you have a car?”

“So that I can leave the city when I wish.”

“Right. That makes sense.”

She lets out a slow breath and goes back to staring out the window, wondering if the entire weekend is going to be like this.

It’ll be fine, she tells herself for the millionth time, and then of course her brain chooses right then to remember the brush of his lips over hers and she buries her face in her palm.

“Are you well?” he asks, breaking the heavy silence that has fallen between them.

“Fine, thanks.”

He glances over at her, then, and she forces herself to drop her hand to her lap, smoothing her hands across the soft fabric of her shorts, brushing out imaginary wrinkles.

She wishes, not for the first time, that the Ambassador hadn’t been quite so vehement about them not bringing work, since each time she sits down to write more of her draft, summer seems to tick by quicker and the beginning of the semester has started looming over her, reminding her that she needs to get everything finished before classes start.

Just that thought makes her want to get some reading done, makes her wish she had never agreed to this, makes her want to point out that this weekend isn’t exactly fair to her side of the deal, not if she’s stuck for so many days without access to her padds and a fake boyfriend who seems set on ignoring her.

His reaction seems incongruous, dissonant with how he was the last time she saw him, that little inkling of support from him being the one thing that got her to agree to this. And now he’s silent, stonily so, and after one more glance at his stern profile, she just folds her arms over her stomach and resumes her study of the hills she can see through the window.

“I didn’t have to come,” she finally says when she decides that he’s probably not going to speak until they get back on Sunday, the way things are going. “If you didn’t want me to.”

He just glances at her again without bothering to actually move his head to do so.

“I have no objection to your presence,” he says into the silence that follows her statement.

“Sure.”

Something in the way he sits changes without any discernable movement on his part, but she still gets the impression he just heaved a sigh.

“Your response indicates that you are not convinced by what I said.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“No, I-“ she starts, then presses her lips together. She wonders just how crazy it would make Spock if she slipped her sandals off and propped her feet up on it like she wants to, but as he didn’t exactly deny that he doesn’t want her there, it’s probably best not to push him. “Never mind.”

“Why do you say that so often?”

“What?” she asks, finally tearing her eyes from her perusal of the dashboard to look over at him. “Say what?”

“’Never mind’. You repeat that phrase or instruct me not to worry about something – which I will point out I am not predisposed to doing in the first place – or simply fail to explain yourself.”

“I don’t do that,” she says, crossing her arms and turning back to study the hills racing past them.

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

“I have a perfect memory.”

“Good for you.” She hugs her arms tighter around herself and leans her head against the window before letting her eyes drift shut for a moment. “Sorry,” she mutters without opening them.

“Explain.”

She digs her thumb and forefinger into her eyes, squeezing them shut before letting her hand drop back to her lap. 

“You’re pointing out that I brush you off and I don’t mean to. So I’m sorry.”

“I see.”

She glances over at him but he’s not looking at her, just staring ahead of them at the road, and she drops her gaze back to her lap, scraping at the nail polish on her thumbnail and frowning when it begins to chip.

“Do you know if Pike has Net access from his house?” she asks without bothering to look up at him.

“No.”

“No you don’t know or no he doesn’t have it?”

“I answered your question.”

“Right,” she says, then presses her palms to the tops of her thighs, her fingers splayed out and tense. “Are you going to be like this all weekend?”

“Pardon?”

“I get that you want this to be over too but you being like this isn’t going to help,” she says to her hands. “And you were the one who wanted to go to this thing.”

“I did not say that.”

“You did, you said that we should increase our efforts, or redouble them, or whatever and now you’re just-“ She lets out a harsh breath and gestures towards him in explanation before dropping her hand back to her lap. 

He cuts his eyes at her and then away again

“I am just?” he finally asks.

She rests her elbow on the armrest set into the door and leans her forehead into her fingers, rubbing at the bridge of her nose.

“Why were you so gung-ho about this if you didn’t want me to actually come?”

“I do not know what ‘gung-ho’ means.”

“Eager. Enthusiastic.”

“Neither of those words aptly describe a Vulcan.”

“You’re half Vulcan.”

“Your powers of observation are, as ever, exemplary.”

“Don’t be a-“ she starts, then bites off the words before something she is going to regret comes out of her mouth, something that she can’t say to a commanding officer, someone she might serve under someday, the man who’s her research advisor and who was her professor, no matter that she’s stuck in a car with him and about to spend an entire weekend in his company. With his boss. And colleagues. Who think they’re dating. And probably sleeping together. And therefore they’re going to be given one room. With just one bed. And he is being a complete-

“Why did you agree to attend if you did not wish to?” he asks and she realizes she’s been squeezing her eyes shut so hard that it’s making her face hurt.

“It wasn’t exactly my first choice of how to spend a weekend.”

He’s quiet for a long moment and his expression is completely, perfectly blank until a muscle in his jaw twitches. “I believe I understand your reticence.”

“Do you.”

“I said as much.”

“Great. Exemplary powers of self reflection, then.” That muscle jumps in his jaw again and she tells herself to look away from him, to not stare over at his profile but there’s something too carefully blank about his expression, the way he’s focused on the road too controlled and careful. “Sorry,” she says again, staring at a car that is passing them – and of course it is, because Spock seems genetically predetermined to go the speed limit. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“It is of no consequence.”

“Still.” The other car has faded into the distance ahead of them, curved out of sight around a corner and left them alone on the road again before her mind retraces his comment, and this time catches on it, sticks there as she ruminates on what he said. “What did you mean that you understand my reticence?”

“You appeared to grasp my intention.”

“Spock.”

“Yes?”

“You didn’t answer.” She gets a raised eyebrow in return, but he doesn’t even bother to look at her, just keeps his focus on the highway in front of them. “Fine,” she says when he stays silent. “Forget I asked.”

“I am unable to-“

“Yeah, got it, perfect memory, etcetera.”

Another car has edged up behind them, passed them, and then sped out of sight by the time he speaks again.

“I meant that you sufficiently conveyed the way in which you did not wish so many individuals to know of our ostensible relationship,” he says, his hands gripping and then easing on the wheel. “I perhaps did not sufficiently parse your intention in communicating such when we discussed attending the gathering this weekend, but the intervening time has allowed for sufficient reflection, which has made your concern abundantly clear.”

“Good,” she says and watches his hands tighten again. 

“Indeed.”

She crosses her arms again, staring out at the guardrail on the edge of the road, old and antiquated and half rusted. 

“It just doesn’t feel right,” she says to the window.

“Of course.”

“First thing we’ve ever agreed on.”

“That is not-“

“-Accurate?” she guesses and watches the corner of his mouth tighten before his face is smooth and blank again. “God, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Seriously.”

“As I said-“

“Why are you being like this?”

“I am not-“ he starts, then cuts himself off which is so out of character, so strange, so discordant from that she finds herself shifting in her seat to study him.

“Why are you so upset?” 

“It would be illogical to be upset.”

“Ok. You are, though.”

“I am quite in control of my emotions,” he answers and when she looks, she swears she sees the odometer edge up, just slightly.

“Sure,” she mutters. “Of course you are.” 

She wouldn’t have agreed to this whole thing if she had thought he would be so infuriatingly, maddeningly silent, so acerbic that if feels like they’re back in the first few days of doing this with each other, when they could barely trade more than a handful of sentences without snapping at each other.

At least they had work then, she thinks, wishing for her school bag and padds of research, all tucked neatly under her desk, waiting for her return. That had been the one thing that had always seemed easy between them – easier, at least, that sitting in a tense and edgy silence in his car, about to spend an entire weekend pretending that they like each other. And now without either of their projects to distract them, convincing anyone that they can actually stand the other’s company seems to be a monumental undertaking.

“Can you just tell me?” she finds she’s asked, without having given herself actual permission to do so. 

“Tell you what?”

“Why you’re-“ She gestures to him again, like that will possibly provide enough explanation. “Like this.”

She feels the car very rapidly decelerate and before she can quite register what’s happened, he’s very suddenly pulled over to the side of the highway. Without the car moving, without the flat fields rushing past them on one side and the hills and mountains rolling by them on the other, the silence that descends upon the car is oppressive, stifling, in a way that’s even worse than before.

She’s not surprised when he gets out and it takes her a moment to do the same, unbuckling her seatbelt and opening her door so that the heat of the day suddenly washes over her.

The sun beats down on her, hot and fierce and it takes her a moment to blink against the brightness. It’s windy, windier than she thought it would be and she has to grab at her hair to keep it from getting in her mouth and eyes, twisting it around her hand as she squints over at him, trying to find an answer in the way he’s standing so incredibly stiff and straight, staring out at a distant mountain.

A car races past them, and then another, and it’s too hot and grit is blowing at them every time the wind blows and he’s just standing there silently, unmoving, and she has really, really had enough.

“Look, I-“

“I did not intend-“

They both pause and she watches a muscle in his cheek jump.

“As I said,” he finally continues, “I understand your reserve in moving forward with this arrangement.”

“Then why are you even willing to go along with it?”

“Why are you?”

“You’re the one with the morals and the unwillingness to lie and the-“ she says, then cuts herself off as his eyes narrow and his mouth moves like he’s about to speak, though he doesn’t. “You shouldn’t want to do this,” she says, slowly. “I don’t understand.”

“You do not wish so many people to know about us.”

“Yes,” she says, drawing the word out while she studies him, like somehow by staring at him she can figure him out.

“That is clear enough.”

“Does the dishonesty not bother you?” she asks.

“I have not lied,” he says stiffly.

“What about what all your coworkers think, and Pike?”

“They have long made assumptions about my life, the latter even more so. I am quite accustomed to inferences regarding my behavior being spread amongst my peer group.”

“Then if you’re so used to it, why are you so upset?”

“I am not-“

“Oh, stop it, you totally are, and it bothers you even though it happens all the time,” she says, answering her own question. “But that’s not all of it.”

“You do not know that.”

“Try me.”

“I do not know what that means.”

“That you might be surprised,” she explains, “Or that your own assumption was not correct.”

He doesn’t say anything in return, just looks at her stonily and she stares right back at him, the way the harsh sunlight is falling across his face and shadowing his eyes, highlighting hints of brown in his hair she doesn’t think she’s ever noticed before. He’s so tall and austere, dressed all in black and in a thick sweater despite the heat around them, so that he seems to stick out from the browns of the hills, the greens of the fields stretching out around them. Of course, he sticks out most places, even in a Vulcan restaurant, so seeing him stand out like a sore thumb on the side of the highway shouldn’t really be that surprising.

And she must be getting better at parsing what he means, must have just spent so much time with him watching him retreat into silence, watching him try to avoid drawing attention to himself, that what he does say and what he doesn’t, what skirts beneath his words suddenly becomes completely and utterly clear to her. 

“It’s not you,” she says quickly. “This isn’t about you. I’m not reticent about doing this with you, it’s about doing it in general.”

“I see.”

She finds herself suddenly a step closer to him.

“I’m serious.”

“Noted.”

“I am.”

“You have said as much.”

“It’s not you. It could be anyone and I’d be hesitant about how many people know,” she repeats and she realizes her hair is fluttering around her face again since she’s dropped her hand from it to hold out to him. She abruptly withdraws it, smooths her palms down the front of her shirt before tucking her hair behind her ears. 

“You sufficiently conveyed that sentiment.”

“Look,” she says, tugging at her shirt again. “You’re…”

“I am?” he prompts when she doesn’t finish her sentence.

“You’re not that bad to be doing this with,” she sighs, crossing her arms and digging her toe into the gravel on the side of the road that she’s standing it. It’s dusty and gritty and she wishes that she weren’t wearing sandals because now it’s getting on her foot, but it’s so hot out that she can’t even begin to imagine being dressed in the type of layers that Spock is, his boots black and pristine. “You’re all… respectful and polite, and other Vulcan things like that.”

“Things?” he repeats and she winces, because she’s a linguist and can probably express herself better than that, with her former professor standing there in front of her. Her former professor who she’s now standing on the side of the highway with, about to drive to spend a weekend as his fake girlfriend. Sharing a bed.

“Things,” she repeats and tightens her arms across her torso.

“You have spent a considerable amount of time informing me that I am rude and discourteous.”

“Well you were,” she points out. “But you could be worse, I could be doing this with someone like -“ She stops herself from naming McKenna, somehow unable to bring up him, specifically, as an example of someone who it would be even more terrible to do this with. “Olson.”

“Chief Engineer Olson?”

“Do you know another?”

“There is an ensign assigned to the-“

“Of course you do,” she says, raising her hand and rubbing at her forehead. “Can you just listen to my point without correcting me every thirty seconds?”

“I do not-“

“If you mention the precise interval of time between instances where you correct me I’m going to scream.”

“Truly?”

“Want to find out?”

He pauses and when she drops her hand to look at him, he’s just watching her.

“I do not believe I do,” he finally answers. “And I understand what you were attempting to convey.”

“Good. Great. Wonderful.”

He’s quiet again, which is fine since she doesn’t really know what to say, either, and settles for dragging her foot through the gravel once more.

“Would you like to keep going?” he asks after a long moment, nodding at the road in front of them.

“Do you?”

“I will leave the choice up to you.”

She closes her eyes against the glare of the sun and lets out a long breath. “We have to try to be nicer to each other.”

“I understand.”

“You have to act like you like me.”

“You must do so as well.”

“We have to be in this together, Spock,” she says. “On each other’s side.”

“That is your responsibility as much as it is mine.”

“And you can’t do that thing you do where you just stop talking.” He doesn’t answer and she reaches out and pokes his shoulder with one finger. It’s somehow firmer than she thought it would be, less bony, like some part of her brain was so sure that the fact he is so slender means he can’t also have that wiry strength she can feel through that one touch.

“Why did you-“ he’s asking, looking down at where she just poked him.

“That. That is the thing that you can’t do.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she says. “You have to be… accessible. Approachable. You can’t just retreat whenever you don’t want to talk about something, like in the car just now. You have to tell me about it so that we can deal with it.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she repeats.

“That is not an answer.”

“It’s not fair,” she says, trying to keep her jaw from clenching like it wants to. “It’s not supportive, either, and it makes me feel like you don’t even care about helping me through all of this, like it’s all up to me to take care of, that it’s ok for you to be completely silent because I’ll come along and fix everything.”

His brows draw together and he studies her in that way of his that is starting to border on really, really annoying, if she wasn’t sure that he was actually thinking about what she had said, turning it over in that giant brain of his in a way that means he’s listening, means he’s at least considering what she has to say.

“I did not intend as much.”

“Fine.”

“I did not,” he says again, softer. “I apologize.” 

She hugs herself a little tighter, presses her lips together and finally nods. “Ok. Uh, thanks.”

“You are aware the Vulcans are touch-telepaths,” he says after a moment and she looks up at him, blinking against the sunlight.

“Of course I am.”

“We do not use language in the way that your culture does.”

“Because you have bonds with your family?” she asks, trying to remember what she’s learned of his society.

“Exactly.” His head tips, slightly, in that way he has when he’s searching for the best way to say something. “Expressing sentiments verbally remains unfamiliar to me, despite the fact that I have served among other species and lived on Earth for as long as I have.”

“You’re friends with Doctor Puri,” she points out.

“Who is exceedingly patient.”

That makes her sigh out a breath through her nose, something that very nearly borders on a laugh. “Well, you can ask my roommate, Kirk, my siblings, my parents, and a host of others in my life about my resounding lack thereof.”

“I believe I have witnessed it first hand,” he says.

“You sure know what to say to a girl.”

“I have also observed that your species struggles with such, in comparison with others.”

“Gee, thanks for that, really.”

He once again sighs without actually appearing to let out any breath. “Rather, I aimed to convey that it is not an issue that you alone have, and furthermore that you are not so ineffectual in such regards as others of your kind.”

“Was that a compliment?”

“A statement of fact.”

She presses her lips together and cuts her eyes to the side, staring off towards the hazy hills in the distance before ducking her head.

“I’ll keep practicing,” she says to her crossed arms before looking up at him again. 

“Self improvement is logical.”

“Precisely,” she says, stealing his own word. “So stop clamming up.”

“Clamming-“

“Being overly quiet,” she corrects. “Like the shellfish.”

“The Mercenaria mercenaria?”

“Maybe?”

“That is a curious turn of phrase.”

“And yet so suitable for certain half-Vulcans I know,” she says. “And, look, I know I’m not your favorite person in the world and that spending time with me is probably barely tolerable and hardly logical, but we’re in this with each other, right? If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it together?”

At that, he finally nods, a short, abrupt gesture.

“Indeed.”

“Then let’s go and do this thing, get it done with,” she suggests.

When he’s pulled back on to the highway again, she starts picking at her nails again, casting about for what to say to fill the quiet between them, when to her surprise he speaks.

“I do not dislike you.”

When she turns from staring out the window to look at him, amazed at what he just said, he’s watching her, his gaze flicking back and forth between her and the road.

“Well good, I don’t not like you either,” she tells him, which is true. Mostly. “Maybe someday we’ll even work up from not not enjoying each other’s company to finding it merely acceptable.”

“Adequate?” he asks.

“Satisfactory,” she answers. “A very passable experience.”

“I anticipate the day with great excitement,” he says so dryly that she finds it nearly draws a smile out of her.

“Well, good.” They lapse back into silence, one which is much more comfortable this time. And it’s only the way he’s not half strangling the wheel and the fact that he doesn’t look perturbed when slips her sandals off and folds her legs under herself that drives her to ask, “Mind if I turn on the radio?”

“If you would like.”

When she flips it on, it’s set to a classical music station and after scanning through the rest of the stations, she returns to that one.

“Is this what you normally listen to?”

“Yes. Is it acceptable?”

“I actually used to play this piece on the piano.”

“Humans occasionally forgo answering a question and instead offer a statement of fact.”

She leans her head against the window and turns to look at him, waiting long enough that he finally glances at her before she responds.

“Sometimes half-humans, half-Vulcans point out idiosyncrasies in a way that’s kind of annoying.”

He raises an eyebrow at her and she raises one right back until she thinks his lips maybe quirk, just slightly.

“Is that so.”

“Yep.”

“I apologize.”

“Oh, it’s fine, I’m getting rather used to it,” she sighs. “And yes, this radio station is completely acceptable. I didn’t know you like Terran music. It’s such a different tradition from Vulcan.”

“It is, but that does not render it unenjoyable.” She’s so busy trying to figure out if she’s ever heard him respond to anything as more than satisfactory, and whether or not unenjoyable means he’s falling over himself he loves it so much that she nearly misses his next words. “I too learned to play this on the piano.”

“Really? They have pianos on Vulcan?”

He frowns minutely. “It does not logically follow that simply because I play piano, I did so in my childhood.”

“Oh.” She stares blankly out the windshield for a minute. “It must be kind of frustrating to always be sussing out the assumptions humans make in the course of a conversation.”

“Yes,” he says so blandly that she smiles. “I learned to play the piano while at the Academy.”

“I can’t imagine you as a cadet,” she admits, glancing over him. He always seems so adult and put together and capable and proficient at just about everything except maybe – definitely – interpersonal skills, that the idea of him going through any type of training instead of leading it just doesn’t fit. “And I didn’t know the Academy offered piano lessons.” He gives her a quick glance and she grimaces, trying to figure out what she said. “Ok, ok, you were obviously a cadet. And… you didn’t necessarily take lessons, or you didn’t necessarily take them at the Academy? Or even if the Academy offers them, that’s not where you learned?”

“Excellent.”

“Thank you.”

“Your correction that I did not take lessons is accurate. There is a piano in T'Elah Hall.”

“And you taught yourself this?” she asks, gesturing to the radio. “This took me almost three months to learn, and a month after that to play it this fast.”

“Piano is substantially easier to master than the ka’athyra.”

“You play? I’ve always wanted to learn how.”

“I do.” 

He glances at yet another car that’s passing them and she finds herself wanting to grin, just a little.

“Is not following the speed limit illogical?”

“Yes.”

“Vulcan travel must be so safe and orderly.”

“It is.” 

“So you’ve probably never gotten a speeding ticket, like ever?”

“The Academy offers ka’athrya lessons if you are truly interested in taking up the instrument.”

“First of all, you didn’t answer my question.”

“Second?” he prompts when she doesn’t continue, just finds herself staring at him and trying to discern if he really, actually ever would have gotten a ticket and wondering, just maybe, just possibly, if a half-Vulcan who decided on Starfleet as a way to get off his home planet might not have a bit of a rebellious streak in him, somewhere down deep.

“What?” she asks. “Oh, secondly, I know about the lessons, I just don’t have time.”

“That is unfortunate.”

“What’s unfortunate is that you totally got a speeding ticket and that I’m going to spend all weekend prying the story out of Puri. Unfortunate for you, I mean, not for him and me. We’ll have plenty of fun. Is that the most devious thing you’ve ever done?”

“Why do you not have time?”

“Why do you not want to admit that you totally got pulled over?”

“You are making a gross assumption.”

“I don’t think so,” she says, finding that she’s grinning at him before she’s realizes that she’s even started to do so. “I don’t think I am at all. And I’m a cadet, I don’t have a chance to do fun things like music lessons, not with school. That’s an assumption you can probably very logically make yourself, you know.”

“The lessons are in place for students who wish to enrich themselves beyond their coursework while at the Academy.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, turning away from him and looking out at the hills again. 

“I do know what that means.”

“What what means?”

“’Yeah, well,’” he repeats and it sounds so odd to hear the phrase in his perfect elocution and articulation that she finds herself wanting to smile again.

“I don’t have time, that’s what I meant. Which I’ve told you three times now.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not? You were a cadet, you know what it’s like.”

“It still stands that the Music Department offers lessons to cadets who-“

“-Wish to enrich themselves, I got it the first time you said it.”

“You do not, in that case.”

“I do not what?”

“Wish to be enriched.”

“Oh. No. Yes. I’m busy,” she tells him.

“You are not always particularly comprehensible.”

“Say’s the guy who said ‘you do not’ as if that’s a sufficient response.” 

“It was.”

“Sure, ok.” She goes back to picking at her nail polish before raising one shoulder towards her ear. “I just care about my grades more than about doing fun stuff like that. And I can’t really do both.”

“Many humans often express that it is other such activities that provide a sufficient balance to their academics and makes their years at the Academy more enjoyable.”

“Well, good for them,” she says, worrying at her thumbnail. “They must all be smarter than me, or better at getting their work done faster in order to have more time.”

“You take an above average number of courses every semester.”

“What’d you do, look up my transcript along with my official record?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, Spock, I’m going to make you share your own if you keep creeping around like that.”

“I am amenable to such.”

She huffs out an unhappy laugh and goes back to staring out the window. “Well, thanks, but I don’t exactly need to see how you probably got perfect marks while doing twelve internships and participating in every single club, while also learning to play the piano.”

“I will not send it to you, in that case.”

“You’re not going to tell me that I just exaggerated?”

“I am not.”

“Well glad one of us had fun as a cadet,” she mutters, dropping her head into her hand, “Even if it’s the one undisposed to such.”

“It is logical to cultivate a well rounded resume.”

“Sure. It must be if you and Puri and Hill and probably the rest of your buddies – not that you’ll admit you have so many friends, of course – are the next big things to hit Starfleet.”

“I believe your class contains a higher than average proportion of students who are expected to make great strides upon graduation.”

“Well, good for them,” she says to a car coming the opposite direction.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his head tilt, just slightly. “You are included in that statement.”

“Not without my one dimensional, completely boring resume, apparently,” she mutters, going back to picking at her nails.

“You do not believe me?”

She lets out a long breath and stares at the road in front of them. “Oh, I believe that I probably need to do something other than coursework, but…”

“Yes?” he asks when she doesn’t continue.

“I hear it from my roommate all the time,” is her only answer. “I’m have my course work, my grades, that’s what I do best, so I don’t think that even trying anything else would be worth it.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“I do not understand why you continue to provide that word as an answer, when it is anything but such.”

“Classes are just what I’m good at, Spock, don’t worry about it, ok?”

He’s quiet for a minute and she hopes he’s dropped it, but of course he hasn’t, of course he just brings it right up again because he is annoying and infuriating and she really has to take back what she said about not disliking if he’s going to be like this.

“You do not wish to undertake a new experience because you fear that you will be less than proficient at it?”

“No.”

“Are you being honest?”

“Yes,” she says, then catches the way he’s looking at her, his eyes darting over to her in between carefully watching the road. “No.”

“As I said, it is logical to cultivate a well rounded-“

“-I heard you-“

“-Resume as a way of demonstrating your ability to adapt and grow as a future officer.”

“Great. I’ll get right on that, then. Pull over, let’s find a new internship for me right now.”

“If you are interested and are not simply exercising your habit of sarcasm – which is not only illogical but also detrimental to a conversation - I spoke with Commander Ho.”

“Good for you. I spoke to her, too, and she wanted to hear all the gossip about the two of us. Probably not the part where we want to strangle each other in the car, but the rest that’s all roses and long walks along the beach.”

“I do not wish to enact violence upon your person.”

“Thanks.”

“Nor are flowers logical.”

“Of course not.”

“And is there a purpose to walking on a beach?”

“Oceanographic survey.”

“Truly?”

“No.” She cuts her eyes over at him and frowns. “Don’t sigh at me.”

“I am not disposed to such emotional actions as-“

“Got it,” she says, then actually does sigh, blowing out a long breath towards the window. “Sorry. I’m sure that was actually an honest question.” He doesn’t answer and she looks back over at him. “It’s a very stereotypical romantic date. And there is no purpose, just walking. And talking, I guess, or not. Lots of hand holding, too. I’m sure it’s lovely.”

“You have never experienced such an event?”

“What did Ho have to say?”

She gets a glance from him out of the corner of his eye before he finally tells her. “She suggested that you apply for an internship with the acoustical engineering department. I had also thought to recommend you to Professor Drayton, who will be teaching Advanced Morphology this fall.”

“What?” she asks, jerking her head away from where she was staring out the window again to look at him. “Really?”

“As I just said-“

“No, I heard you, I heard you. And wait, you won’t be teaching it?” 

“It is likely that I will not continue to teach in the department as my other duties to the Academy as well as the Enterprise will dominate most of my time.”

“Oh.” The thought of the Xenolinguistics department with him seems pretty… strange. Disquieting. Maybe even disappointing. He might not be the world’s best fake boyfriend, but he had been a fantastic professor and the building would seem so empty without his quiet presence in his office. “Thank you for thinking of me.”

“I can inform her that you do not have sufficient time.”

“No,” she says sharply. “Don’t do that.”

“If you are not certain that you-“

“You aren’t being serious,” she says slowly, squinting at him. “Or you wouldn’t have brought that up in the first place.”

“You intimated that-“

“Oh my God, you’re teasing me. 

“I am doing no such thing.”

“Stop. Stop it.”

“As I am not-“

“The fact that Vulcans don’t lie is complete bull, Spock.”

“Bull?”

“Bullshit. Crap. Wait, I mean-“ She presses her hand to her mouth. “I didn’t mean to swear in front of you. Sorry. Don’t repeat that,” she says, her words tumbling over herself with excitement at the idea of either internship. “I want to do them, which ever, if you think I’d be accepted. Those are… I’d be good at those.”

“The likelihood is that you would be in a position to choose between them. And no thanks is necessary. It is logical to recommend qualified cadets to positions which would advance their careers.”

“Still.” She fiddles with the hem of her shorts for a long moment, running the fabric between her thumb and forefinger. “That was… That was nice of you to think of me, especially for something in my field like that.”

“As I said, it was logical.”

“But I’m still trying to thank you.”

“It was-“

“Just say ‘you’re welcome’.”

“No.”

“Fine, say ‘you are welcome’.”

“I will do no such thing.”

She presses her face into her palm and wants to scream and to sigh and to call Gaila so that she can have someone to commiserate with. The idea that they have to stop having conversations like these, tripping over each other and unable to agree on anything as soon as they get to Pike’s seems ludicrous, completely crazy that they could ever smoothly interact. But she doesn’t have Gaila there to complain to, she has Spock and she’s going to be sharing a bed with the man.

“Are you laughing?” he asks and she nods, pinching at the bridge of her nose and trying to make herself stop. “Explain.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” she says quickly, dropping her hand. “I’m really not.”

“I do not understand.”

“It’s just-“ she says, waving back and forth between them. “We fight half of the way to Pike’s, then can still barely talk-“

“-It was not precisely halfway and further more I would not classify that as-“

“-Who the hell is going to believe us for three days?” she asks, rather unable to stop smiling at how completely insane this whole thing is. “We’re going to need to take lessons from Puri and Stoyer. Talk about a resume builder, maybe we can put it under professional skills – developed the ability to persuade colleagues of a fraudulent relationship.”

“That was not an expertise I had considered you cultivating when I suggested you undertake pursuits other than your coursework.”

“Yeah, but how good would it be - we could form a study group, you and me, watch romantic comedies, make lists of ways couples interact.”

“Perhaps undertake empirical research?” he asks in that dry tone of his and she can’t help the huff of laughter that escapes her again. “It may very well be useful.”

“Interviews or would you want to do something more concrete?”

“I would prefer quantitative methods.”

“Of course you would. Oh my God, I bet you’ve never done qualitative research in your life, have you?”

“Indeed I have not.”

“Well, just for you, we could run a regression analysis.”

“Attempt to reject a null hypothesis?”

“This could be our newest paper,” she says, shaking her head slowly and smiling. “How to date for two people who never, ever do.”

“You do not?” he asks.

“I don’t what? Date?” she asks. “No, not really. I mean, obviously, right?”

He doesn’t speak again and she’s quickly lost in the thought of the weekend that they’re driving towards, of being with him for so long with so many people around. People who think they’re together and will expect them to act like that, and her brain catches on and sticks on the thought of actually touching him. On purpose. In front of others. Being demonstrative with him in a way that she hasn’t been with a man in what is turning out to be longer than she can actually remember. And not just men she meets the few times she goes out dancing with Gaila, or the one off dates that have been peppered across her two years at the Academy, but acting like she has a boyfriend who she wants to touch out of affection.

It’s foreign in a way that’s depressing, like a long unused skill that has grown so rusty that she doesn’t even know where to begin.

She so busy worrying at her lip and trying to imagine what it will even be like, to be so expressive and unreserved with him, that she hardly noticed he’s taken an exit from the highway until they’re already on a smaller road.

It makes her stomach clench and when she looks over at him, his hands have tightened on the wheel again, in that way he was doing when they first got into the car.

And if she’s sitting there, pressing her fingers into her stomach through her shirt, rubbing at the knot of nausea that’s forming, she can only imagine how he is, what’s simmering under that suddenly too calm expression of his.

“Spock?” she asks a tree outside of the window they’re driving by, slower than they were on the highway.

“Yes?”

“When I said it wasn’t about you, doing all of this with you, I mean, I was serious,” she tells a bush. “I think if you had a good handle on just how many women at Starfleet would rather trade places with me right now, you would have a truckload of dilithium crystals and be halfway to Delta Maenali IV by now. I just don’t want you to think that I have an issue with you, beyond this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

“I believe you have yet to ascertain precisely how little dilithium is needed to power a ship, and furthermore, we will not be doing space trials near Delta Maenali IV. Neptune is far enough.”

“You’re correcting me again. And still.” She studies the way the road is hurrying past underneath them, a blurry, gray track that’s sweeping by all too quickly. “I don’t know why you can’t see that.”

“You are single.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You also possess estimable qualities that individuals interested in a romantic relationship with you would find appealing.”

“Yeah, but as we established I have limited patience, can have quite a temper, am apparently a poor communicator, and all I ever do is my homework which makes me a pretty boring person,” she says lightly. “Plus, not many men want to share me with the library. That building and I are in a serious, committed relationship.”

“That is an expression of sexuality I have yet to encounter in humans.”

“I was joking. Obviously. Being facetious.”

“I was born in 2230.”

“What?” she asks, blinking at him, and trying to figure out how old that makes him. Not that much older than herself, really, which is strange to think about, that they’re closer in age than she might have guessed if she had ever thought to wonder about it. 

“I mean to say that yesterday was not the day of my birth,” he says and despite herself, despite the achingly long car ride, and the fact that she’s about to sleep in a bed next to him, and spend days pretending that she’s probably falling in love with him, that she genuinely likes him, she bursts out laughing again, louder this time, the swelling anxiety in her stomach and chest briefly pushed back, just for a moment.

“Vulcans don’t joke,” she says through the hand she’s clapped over her mouth, though despite it, she’s still quite unable to staunch her smile.

“I was simply stating a fact.”

“Of course you were,” she says and she’s still grinning, up until Spock pulls onto an even smaller road, one that curves up into the hills. “Is this it?”

“Nearly.”

“Really?”

“Is that not apparent?”

“As if I wasn’t nervous enough,” she mutters, wiping her palms on her shorts.

“You are nervous?” he asks, curiosity coloring his tone. “Explain.”

“Well, it’s…” she waves at him, then at her, then at the road in front of them, which just earns her a stern glance.

“You have never failed to be successful in negotiating a social situation, as far as I can determine.”

She swallows as he turns off the road and onto a long driveway.

“That doesn’t mean it’s always easy.”

“I see.”

“Are you nervous?” she finally asks, even though she quite clearly knows the answer to that.

“No,” he says but she doesn’t think he’s quite driving the speed limit and there’s something about his expression and the way he holds himself that’s too tense. 

“Are you sure?” she asks as he carefully rounds two curves, then pulls up in front of a huge, sprawling house, set into the hills around it and with a handful of other cars parked out front.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“It is immaterial to worry about such things, as we have arrived.”

She looks at him for a long moment, then at the house, then back at him. She thinks she sees the door open, sees someone - probably Puri - waving at them and takes a deep breath. He isn’t exactly reaching for his door handle, either, and has only gotten as far as unbuckling his seatbelt.

“Are we going to be really, really convincing?” she asks him since she’s pretty sure one of the cars has diplomatic tags on it, meaning the Ambassador is very likely there already.

“I suppose.”

“You ready?”

“We do not have a choice.”

“I’m not ready either,” she assures him, making herself unbuckle her own seatbelt and reach down to slip her sandals back on. “We’re going to be nice to each other?”

“Indeed.”

“And-“ The words catches in her throat and she wishes she had brought some water, maybe, or something else to drink because her mouth feels a little dry. “Affectionate?”

“That is likely part of the parameters needed in order to successfully carry out this plan.”

“Parameters,” she mutters. “Is that Vulcan enthusiasm, Spock? Like a well written lab protocol?”

“As I said before, Vulcans are hardly enthusiastic.”

“Good thing you’re half human, then,” she tells him, reaching to open her door and stepping out into the sun, returning Puri’s wave with one of her own, and as wide a smile as she can muster. 

“Is it?” he asks and she glances back at him over the roof of the car, taking a deep breath and letting it out again.

“It is. Definitely,” she says firmly, then nods up at the house. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And speaking of getting things over with, a quick note to say that I have the next chapters of ‘For the Rest of Us’ nearly ready and then I have finals to slog through. Not to leave you on the cusp of Spock and Nyota’s big weekend, but that is exactly what I’m going to do until my papers are done and turned in. Here’s hoping I have the type of willpower and focus these two dorks always seem to have when it comes to their work (and each other)!


	12. Chapter 12

“How is your room?” Taele asks and it’s so sudden that the glass Nyota is holding slips and hits the counter with a thump. It doesn’t break, thankfully, but water slops out of it, wetting her hand.

“It’s fine,” she answers, reaching for one of the towels hanging from a cupboard knob by the stove. It’s actually a lot nicer than fine, but she refuses to give it full credit because it’s lacking the couch that she was half hoping might possibly just be there.

Instead, there’s just a bed. A big bed, granted, but just a bed, and a bathroom and closet and bureau and two nightstands and a window with a gorgeous view of the desert, and, when she had left to come downstairs, a half-Vulcan who she had been doing a pretty good job of not making eye contact with.

“What will you do now?” Taele asks.

“Oh, uh,” Nyota says, even though for someone with as many languages as she knows, she could have done much, much better with a response. But Spock had promised he would help her out with this type of stuff and instead, he’s still upstairs and if he’s up there talking to Puri, who has the room next to them, instead of down there with her, she is going to have a legitimate problem with her fake boyfriend.

“You should spend time with the Commander,” Taele informs her.

“Yeah, he’s-“ Nyota says, waving off towards the stairs. “Uh he’s-“ she starts again, then lets out the breath she didn’t know she was holding when he finally, finally starts walking down those stairs. She tries very hard not to glare at him and is pretty sure she more or less succeeds.

Do something, she tells herself, or maybe she’s trying to telepathically prod him into some type of action and wouldn’t that be nice, that bond that Vulcan couples have so that she could harass him in the privacy of their minds for abandoning her within five minutes of arriving at Pike’s.

“We’re going to…” she says and hopes that the hand she puts on his back looks more casual than if feels, since she thinks that maybe her elbow is sticking out strangely and how long, exactly, is she going to leave her hand there? Is there a certain amount of time that would be best? Should she have gone for more of a pat than a lingering touch? Now that it’s there, is it weird to pull it away so soon?

Every possible pursuit for the day that her brain is able to supply hinges around working on her paper or their Romulan project or having a cup of tea, since those seem to be the activities she and Spock are capable of carrying out with minimal difficulty, and are tried and true and practiced well enough that they don’t feel weird or unnatural, not like her hand on his back does.

But they didn’t bring work and brewing tea will only forestall the fact that she has no idea what they’re supposed to be doing this entire weekend, and that she’s not exactly a person who takes vacations, let alone vacations at her fake boyfriend’s boss’ house with telepathic Ambassadors who control substantive dilithium crystal supplies.

“Perhaps we might go for a walk,” Spock finally suggests and she agrees so quickly that she nearly forgets to take her hand off of him.

It might not be as hot as Vulcan outside, but the sun and heat is a welcome change from the damp fog of San Francisco, and what’s better is that the Ambassador doesn’t follow them, just watches them head down a path leading away from the house.

When Pike’s house is out of sight, she lets out a breath and stares out over the desert.

“We’re going to have to find things to do with everyone back there.”

“I am aware.”

“As in be sociable and spend time with all of them.”

“Naturally.”

She glances behind them, even though she can’t see the house.

“Want to go on a really, really long walk first?”

“I am amenable to that course of action,” he says and she thinks that’s progress at least, something they can agree on, even if it means avoiding everyone else and therefore being alone together.

…

Pike’s kitchen is huge. Like really, really huge and Nyota hasn’t been in anyone’s kitchen in a while, not since the last time she went home to see her parents. The wide island counter and enormous stove and two ovens makes the kitchen in the house she grew up in seem small and cramped, no matter that her parents fed three children and whatever cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents were at the house out of it.

Still, her parents had never had to deal with this number of different species eating in one place, so maybe the size of Pike’s kitchen is a good thing. 

“Here,” she says, grabbing for a plate of salad in one hand and tossing a washcloth over where the Ambassador is enthusiastically splattering the counter with bits of lamb.

“What is the purpose of that?” Taele asks, regarding the cloth with abject suspicion.

“It’s just a little-“ she starts, then has to bite back calling it gross, or stomach-churning, or kind of obnoxious. “Slightly worrisome, as our digestive tracks can’t contend with raw meat.”

“An unfortunate circumstance.”

“It’s all relative,” Nyota says and swallows, looking away from the Ambassador’s plate, thinking that maybe trying to have lunch at the same time as Taele might have been a mistake, not that she and Spock exactly had a choice, what with the way they were veritably being followed around the house even since returning from their walk.

“Yum,” Puri declares, walking into the kitchen and peering over the Ambassador’s shoulder. He walks over to Spock next and looks at the two plates of salad she and Spock have gotten out, one of which she’s still holding. “Not yum.”

“That phrase is not grammatically correct.”

“Good thing you found yourself a linguist,” Puri laughs, smacking Spock on the shoulder. “A linguist who also seems to subsist on greenery.”

“The correct term is lettuce.”

“Where is your wife?” Taele asks, ripping off a large piece of lamb.

“Around here somewhere.”

“You do not know her exact location?”

“Not in the kitchen,” Puri specifies. “We’re not like Spock and Uhura here, joined at the hip.”

Spock actually glanced down at the space between their bodies, which makes Nyota consider smiling.

“They are not,” Taele says, her gaze so piercing that Nyota feels herself wanting to shrink back from it, and her tone so disapproving that Nyota thinks she should probably take a step closer to Spock.

She doesn’t, though, just sets the plate she’s holding in front of him on the counter so that he can add anything more to it, or not, since she wouldn’t put it past him to think a salad with lettuce, a couple pieces of carrots, and a single disc of cucumber is an acceptable meal. Probably no dressing, either, she guesses, pulling open Pike’s refrigerator and sorting through it to find anything else she can add to her lunch.

It’s mostly beer, wine and enormous pieces of meat for the Ambassador and she’s about to give up and live with a completely boring salad or try to see how good the replicator is when she feels a wash of heat at her back and Spock’s standing over her, behind her, reaching up into the top of the back shelf where she can’t see let alone reach and handing her a small container of olives.

“Thank you,” she says, looking down at where he’s placed it in her hands. He retrieves a block of cheese as well, and a jar of dressing from the shelf on the door, even though she probably could have reached that one. “Want some?” she asks, waving the container of olives at him.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Is it not logical to explore new experiences?” When he doesn’t answer, she can’t help but shake her head at him. “Fine, enjoy your boring lunch.”

“Is it not all relative?”

“Hush,” she instructs. “And hand me a fork.”

He does, holding it out by the handle so that she either has the choice of grabbing the tines or putting her fingers close enough to his that their hands might touch. She hesitates, reaches for it, avoids his skin, and ignores the heat that sweeps over her fingers in favor of forking olives onto her plate.

Puri’s neatly sawing off a piece of tenderloin, the Ambassador is still tearing at her lamb, and Nyota can’t help but glance out at the sun soaked porch, feeling like she wants to take her salad as far from potential contact with raw meat as possible. That, and if Spock is going to retrieve lunch items for her, she might as well be nice and eat where he wants to.

“I will join you as well,” Taele informs them when they start outside and that’s really less than ideal, but the sun feels nice and the olives and cheese are nicer still, and there are probably worse things in life than having lunch with a man who was only ever supposed to be her professor and the Ambassador chewing on raw meat.

“I feel like we have a very disapproving, very overbearing, carnivorous shadow,” she tells Spock when the Ambassador finally takes a break from watching them eat in order to retrieve another leg of lamb. “Think she’s going to be this into us until Sunday? I think Stoyer might have had the right plan, disappearing for a couple hours.”

“That may very well be the case.”

“Are you bummed that it’s illogical to spend too much time avoiding the Ambassador?”

“No.”

“I am,” she says, stabbing at an olive.

“You could have avoided attending this weekend.”

She glances over at him, then down at her salad, and then off into the hazy hills, the desert stretching out past Pike’s porch.

“It’s all right.” She adds a piece of cheese to her fork before popping both it and the olive in her mouth. “I miss my paper, though.”

“Most humans express excitement and eagerness for a break from their responsibilities.”

“Well, I’m weird, what can I say, don’t tell me you haven’t picked up on that by now.” She shrugs and drags a piece of carrot through a smear of dressing. “And I don’t like vacation.”

“What are your normal pursuits during such?”

“Finding research advisors to date.”

“Truly?”

“No.” She chews the carrot, swallows it. “Just this once, thought I’d try it out for posterity’s sake. What do you normally do when the Academy’s not in session?”

“Other professional pursuits.”

“Well,” she says, sorting through her lettuce for another olive and spying one hidden under a leaf. “Aren’t we just two peas in a pod?”

“Pardon?”

“I meant that we’re alike.”

“Ah.”

“I’ll even prove it: what do you do on weekends?”

“Work.”

“Like looking in a mirror,” she says. “Except for the fact that I make better salads than you do.”

“Again, a relative measure. And there are no mirrors out here, nor do you and I bear any resemblance to each other even if there were.”

“Still,” she says, spearing a cucumber. “Although, sometimes I go out with my roommate.”

“Out?”

“Bars, drinking, dancing, illogical human frivolity.”

“Cultural traditions are not illogical.”

“What we get up to those nights might be.” She realizes what she’s said, then, to an officer. “I, uh, don’t actually drink that much, though.” He’s still just looking at her, a few pieces of lettuce speared on his fork, though he’s making no move to eat them, and she wonders if he’s calculating the likelihood that she’s lying. Not telling the whole truth, really, since she doesn’t normally drink that much, not that she particularly feels the need to disseminate her typical alcohol consumption with him, and she’s at least generally better behaved than Gaila and Kirk.

And, whatever, he’s not her actual boyfriend, his opinion of her life doesn’t matter outside of the bounds of him overseeing her paper, and he can think of her what he will. If he wants to imagine her cavorting over the greater San Francisco area, picking up men and partying the night away, he can, no matter that that supposition would hardly be accurate.

“I, too, was a cadet, I am familiar with the particular activities undertaken during leisure time, not to mention that which officers are predisposed towards while on shore leave.”

“Yeah, well, if it’s really all relative, then do Vulcans have wild parties and spend the night out on the town?”

“No.”

“Alcohol doesn’t effect Vulcans, right? But if you’re half human, can you get drunk?”

“No.”

“Do you know this through empirical evidence or is this deduction derived through extrapolated theory?” she asks, skewering him with a look.

“Your earlier statement suggested that you do not pursue a balanced mix of activities in your leisure time.”

“First of all, you knew that, second of all, I don’t have leisure time since I’m a cadet as we’ve established, and third of all, way to change the subject.” She pauses and takes the moment to impale a slice of tomato. “And, fourth, actually, when you do that you’re really just admitting that you don’t want to answer, which only gives me reason to guess what your answer would be.”

“I am pleased to offer you the opportunity to practice your powers of logical deduction.”

“Thank you,” she says primly. “But I’m still putting money on the fact that you, at some point, set out to find exactly what effect alcohol has on your genetic makeup. Was it with Puri? I bet it was with Puri.”

“Are those individual wagers or combined?”

“Individual.”

“You are aware that gambling violates the Academy code of conduct.”

“And you’re aware that like eighty percent of cadets enjoy weekly poker games.”

“Eight three.”

“What do you do, go around and count?”

“You evidently do not, as that pursuit was not listed among those that you engage in.”

“Well, I prefer to hold on to my credits so that I can use them to make the big bucks on certain Commanders I know and their sordid pasts. Speeding tickets, drinking, what else have you gotten up to?” she asks, folding one leg over the other and watching him like she’ll be able to figure out the answer if she stares at him long enough. “Is there a string of women who have had their hearts broken by you?”

“That phrase is illogical.”

“Knew it.”

“I have not admitted to-“

“You saying you don’t date doesn’t mean a whole lot, I’m thinking,” she says, looking at him there sitting in the sun, his forearms resting on the table and his hands neatly laced – and he has big hands, she’s realizing, looking at them. The way he’s sitting is making his shirt stretch across his arms and she’s never really bothered to look, not like she is now, but he must work out more than she would have ever thought, if him working out was something she spent any time thinking about in the first place.

And he does have that quiet, reserved demeanor which probably a lot of women would take for being mysterious and intriguing, especially if they were never forced to actually hold a conversation with him and find out just how infuriating the man is.

“Now you are being illogical, that is spurious reasoning at best.”

“No, at best I’m right,” she says.

The problem is that now that she’s though about it, she wants to ask him about him dating, wants to ask if him saying that he doesn’t date is some knee-jerk response he has, some semantic, overly particular interpretation that leaves plenty of room for other pursuits and, knowing him, plenty of confusion both on his part and the part of whoever he would have undertaken such an experience with.

She makes herself let the topic drop because what he does or doesn’t do – or did or didn’t do – with nameless, faceless women really isn’t her business, and there’s no need to make the fact that they’re sharing a bed any more awkward than it needs to be, not if she’s going to keep up a conversation that makes her want to return her gaze to the way his shirt fits him so incredibly well. 

And she isn’t going to just sit there in silence with him and wait to see if the Ambassador comes out to bother them again, so she asks “When you’re not out not pretending to date your former students and you’re not downing shots and you’re not getting pulled over for going a tenth of a mile per hour over the speed limit and say you’re between projects at work, what else do you get up to? If there’s really nothing else to do?”

He must want to drop the topic, too, and move on, because he actually answers her.

“At times, I travel.”

“Really?” she asks, scooping up the last bit of her lettuce even though it’s a little mashed and too soggy from sitting in a pool of dressing. “Where?”

“I wished to see the northern lights, so I went to Alaska.”

“Let me guess, you stayed for like two seconds and then immediately got back in the car and turned the heat up full blast.” She pauses, studying him. “That, or you never got out of the car.”

“I got out of the car.”

“Really?”

“I said that I did.”

“For how long?”

“I took the opportunity to observe the beginning of the Iditarod.”

“Oh, neat. I mean, that’s interesting. Was it cool?”

“It was quite cold, yes.”

She smiles at him, shaking her head slowly. “Where else do you go?”

“The Atacama desert.”

“And?”

“To see the Nazca Lines.”

“And?”

“The Pyramids, as well as the Great Wall, the Amazon rainforest, and the Acropolis.”

“Geez I haven’t even been to most of those places and I grew up here.” She drops her fork onto her plate and stares over at him, slightly amazed that he took the time to look around Earth so thoroughly. “But then again, if I went to Vulcan I’d probably want to spend the entire trip seeing the Forge, Mouth Seleya, and the Temple of Amonak.”

“You are well versed in Vulcan landmarks.”

“Well, it’s very nearly like travelling, looking up pictures and wishing you had the time and credits to go.”

“That is not an accurate substitution.”

“Obviously,” she mutters.

“You were being sarcastic.”

“Yep.” She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms and looking at him, imagining him going to all these places. By himself, she thinks, and doesn’t even need to ask in order to confirm the fact that he wouldn’t have brought anybody with him, since if she’s learned anything about him at all, it’s that he hates interesting food and does an admirable job avoiding contact with others as much as possible. 

Which is probably why they’re sitting on their own on the porch and he finished his salad ten minutes ago because there was basically nothing on it.

“What was your favorite trip?” she asks, because she doesn’t really want to go back inside yet, not if the Ambassador is in there.

“They all had their own unique strengths and weaknesses.”

“I bet you hated Alaska the most.”

“I do not hate anything.”

“Except olives. Oh, wait, you’ve never tried them, so they might be your new favorite food and you’d never know. And, God, Spock, you went all the way to Greece and didn’t get any? Let me guess, you went to Rome, too, and had plain pasta?”

“I did not stay long enough for a meal.”

“Knew it. What, you dropped in, saw the Colosseum, and got back to the Academy before dinner was over?”

“As I was staying in Paris, the return trip did not take very long. Nor did I see the Colosesum, I was more interested in the Pantheon.”

“Paris?” she asks. “Did you at least get a croissant?”

“No.”

“What were you even doing there, then? Isn’t that half the point?”

“The Federation council was in session and my father’s attendance was required. I was too young to be left on Vulcan.”

“But old enough to go to Rome?” she asks and she doesn’t know what’s weirder, the fact that he shared that with her or the fact that when he talks about his parents, he’s talking about the Vulcan Ambassador and his wife. He doesn’t answer her question, just arranges his silverware so that they’re perfectly parallel on his plate and she finds herself staring at him again, her mind churning, before she blurs out, “Oh my God, shut up.”

“Pardon?”

“You didn’t tell your parents you went.” She laughs and has to resist the urge to kick him under the table. “I can’t believe you, how old were you?”

“How did you-“

“-You totally skipped town, took yourself on an afternoon-long tour of Europe, and got back before anyone knew you were missing.”

He doesn’t answer for a long moment and then she thinks he maybe sighs. “It was morning.”

She doesn’t ask if it was logical, because it either was and that’s no fun to tease him about, or it wasn’t and somehow forcing him to admit that feels like it might ruin the moment, so instead she just smiles again and asks, “Have you ever told them?”

“No.”

“I think I’m going to write a letter to one Ambassador Sarek, Vulcan Embassy, outlining your adolescent adventures.”

“That is not a sufficiently specific mailing address.”

“You will tell them yourself in person,” Taele says and Nyota jumps, her hand pressed to her chest with how suddenly the Ambassador appeared behind her.

“Wha- What?” she asks, trying to slow her pulse and wondering if it’s ok to ask Taele to maybe announce herself next time, instead of just gliding silently out onto the porch.

“There is a reception at Starfleet Headquarters next week and the Commander’s parents will be in attendance.”

“What?” Nyota asks again, this time of Spock.

“I found it, ma’am,” Puri yells out the door, holding up a rack of ribs. “I’ll split them with you, if you want.”

“I will return,” Taele says, leaving her plate with a pile of raw lamb on it on the table and going back inside, the door falling shut behind her.

“Your parents are coming?” Nyota asks when she’s sure the Ambassador – and the only Ambassador who she has any intention of dealing with this summer – is gone.

“Indeed.” He adjusts his fork, even though she’s sure he doesn’t need to, since it was already perfectly aligned. “I had not thought to inform you of that fact.”

“Good, that’s good. Because we’re not, I’m not- This doesn’t mean that I have to-“

“No,” he says just as quickly, that Vulcan austerity and composure fracturing just for a second with how rushed that word is, before he’s calm again, his expression perfectly blank. “Meeting them will not be necessary.”

“Good,” she says, then repeats herself to drive home the fact that she really, really doesn’t want to have to meet his parents. “Good, that’s good.”

“Indeed,” he says and she doesn’t think she’s the only one who sounds relieved.

“Want to make ourselves scarce before the Ambassador comes out here and attacks another innocent cut of meat?” she asks since she really doesn’t want to sit there any longer and stew on the idea of his parents being in town.

And he must not either, or maybe that was just enough sharing for the day, because he follows her inside to do their dishes without complaint and without making further conversation.

…

She knows that he feels that slight, unconscious jump when his fingers graze over her back and just hopes that the Ambassador who’s just sitting there watching them doesn’t also see it.

“Rhaeinae,” she says, because she’s a linguist and she should be able to debate whether or not it’s a legal Scrabble word with Hawkins, no matter that Spock’s hand is warm and gentle on her shoulder blade. 

“Would you like a cup of tea tea?” he asks, quietly, and she nods, half listening because tea is their thing and it’s normal and ordinary, and it’s easier to focus on outdated Cardassian than it is to think about his hand and how soft his voice is.

He stands from where he’s been sitting on the couch behind her, his knee a careful six inches from her shoulder since he didn’t want to play, didn’t want to join them cross-legged on the floor with the game spread over the coffee table.

She had been half expecting him to disappear as soon as he turned them down, and she thinks maybe he had been thinking the same thing because he had hesitated before sitting there so close to her, watching in silence as she and Hawkins decided on what languages would be fair game.

“Not to late to jump in,” Hawkins says when Spock gets back with two steaming mugs.

Spock pauses in that way of his, where she knows he’s parsing Hawkin’s phrase, silently running through options of what it might mean. She’s about to explain it to him when he sits down on the couch again, holding one mug out to her.

“No, thank you,” he says so seriously that he could have been offered a transfer to another ship, an opportunity for command that he needed to carefully consider before turning it down.

He seems to also be carefully considering touching her again, but he doesn’t, which is a good thing because his hand on her is way, way too distracting for what a good player Hawkins is.

“You’re welcome to join, as well,” Nyota says to Taele, who is watching them over steepled fingers, her elbows braced on the arms of her chair.

“No.”

“Kind of would have thought Scrabble would be your thing,” she tells Spock, later, when she’s sliding the tiles back into their bag and Hawkins has found a convenient reason to be somewhere other than where the Ambassador is.

“Games are illogical.”

“Not really, though. It’s a good way to learn new vocabulary and it’s mentally challenging.” At least more mentally challenging than just sitting around all day, what with the ban on school work. Or, more mentally challenging for her, maybe not for him. Maybe for someone with a Vulcan intellect, playing word games is the equivalent of watching paint dry. “Plus, it’s a good bonding activity, or are you still not into the idea of making yourself accessible to the crew?”

“I am here,” he says stiffly and she has to nod and give him credit for that.

“Beer? Wine? Tequila shots?” Olson asks, sticking his head into the room. “We’re getting this weekend started.”

“Has it not yet begun?” Spock asks, looking at the doorway Olson just vanished from when Nyota said yes to a glass of wine.

“Started, started,” she clarifies. “Yet another good chance to get to know everyone in a way that has nothing to do with work.”

“I do not drink.”

“Well, your loss. Or ours, if you wanted to reprise your experiment of alcohol on your system.” She closes the small bag of tiles and drops it into the box the game came in. “Although, I’m sure that by subsisting on fruit and vegetables and avoiding alcohol, you’re much healthier than all of us. No wonder you all live so long.”

“It is logical to adhere to a healthy lifestyle.”

“Hmm, but indulging yourself every once in a while must carry it’s own certain rationality,” she says, thinking about a nice bar of chocolate. Or, rather, the glass of wine that Olson drops off for her before retreating from the room again.

“How do you play?” Spock asks, nodding at the Scrabble board.

“You didn’t pick it up just by watching us?”

“I was referring more to your particular strategy.”

“My strategy is to win. Take no prisoners, no mercy, a swift and resounding defeat.”

“Is a physical alteration with your opponent an integral part of the game? It did not appear to be so.”

“If you want to play instead of sitting around while everyone drinks, you can just say.” He doesn’t, though, and she stops waiting for him to do so and instead just starts taking the tiles back out of the bag. “One game and then I’m going to go schmooze with people I want jobs from someday.”

“I am tasked with much of the hiring for the Enterprise.”

“Then let’s hope you’re not put off by getting your… getting beat by a subordinate.”

“Getting my?” he repeats and he doesn’t sit on the floor but perches on the edge of the couch, so that when he leans forward to study the board, his shirt pulls taut against the long line of his back. She can see the dip of his spine and the hard juts of his shoulder blades. He’s really not as skinny and bony as she always considered him, but quite a bit more built, in a lean and graceful sort of way that she never noticed before.

She clears her throat and goes to sit on the other side of the board from him.

“Getting your ass handed to you. Draw a letter, let’s see who goes first. And I’ll let you pick the languages, you know what I speak.”

“I trust you will be a formidable opponent in any of them?” he asks, choosing a T out of the bag.

“Stone cold wordsmith,” she promises him. “Consider yourself warned.”

“You were not so seemingly ruthless with Lieutenant Hawkins,” he says and only then does she realize that Taele is still in the room, silently watching them. It’s no matter, though, since she can clobber Spock with an audience as well as she can without one.

“Ah, well, I have high hopes for you, Commander.”

“Likewise, Cadet.”

…

“Oh shit,” Pike says. “I’m sorry, Spock.” He’s frowning at the burgers he just placed on the grill, his lips pursed like he can somehow sort out a solution, like this is a sticky First Contact. “I meant to throw something on for you, first.”

“It is of no consequence,” Spock answers and Nyota really, really wants the last of the potato salad she had just served herself – because apparently Pike can captain a starship, but he can’t get all the dishes for dinner out at the same time, and burgers are the last thing to get cooked – but she beat Spock handily, twice, and the guy probably deserves dinner after that.

“Here,” she says, handing him her plate, though she retrieves her fork from it before doing so since he doesn’t exactly seem like a swapping spit type of person, nor are they actually doing so on the regular, no matter what everyone else thinks about them.

“That is your food.”

“Take it.”

“No.”

“Eat it.”

“No.”

“Just do it, Spock.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise you’re going to have a piece of bread for dinner. Probably plain, maybe accompanied by a glass of water if you’re really feeling fancy.”

He had been upstairs while the rest of them had started eating, either licking his wounds after being resoundingly trounced or, more likely, taking the opportunity to meditate while she was busy helping Pike cook. Vulcans may not sleep a lot, but at least humans don’t need uninterrupted peace and quiet, not to mention complete privacy in order to maintain their equilibrium, and she had carefully avoided their room in case that was what he was doing.

She’s also making a habit of avoiding that room, in general, which is why she’s still in short sleeves and is freezing cold, and that reality is not helping the fact that she either wants him to take the food or not, so that she can either eat it or cross her arms around herself in order to warm up. Standing there, holding her plate out to him and bickering with him is a poor substitute for either option, both of which would involve the chance to continue drinking her wine, as well.

“I made it myself, extra special,” she promises, not that that will make a difference to him, since the only real way to get him to eat it would probably be to just serve him an ungarnished, boiled potato with a side of logic, but she can try.

And he must be hungry, though who wouldn’t be after such a tiny salad for lunch, because he finally takes it from her.

“Thank you.”

“Careful, it tastes good, you might just like it,” she tells him, then goes off to find something that might be equally delicious, though probably not, and hopefully warm.

She’s not the only one who’s feeling the chill of the desert night, and it becomes more apparent as everyone who was sitting relaxed, loose and limber in the setting sun begins to cross their legs and arms and huddles into their jackets. Nobody goes inside, though, since the stars are bright and clear, and Olson and McKenna brought out a cooler of drinks, and the moon is rising out over the hills.

The crickets start up, then, a perfect harmony to the setting sun and Nyota can’t help but mind a little less that she’s wishing for the sweater that’s tucked into her bag, since she’s certainly not leaving this moment, the sky lit up and pinks and golds and reds, to go up and retrieve it.

“Cold?” she hears Puri ask Stoyer, and he unzips his coat to drape around her shoulders.

“Thanks, hon,” Stoyer says, snuggling under his arm. “And I’m fine, but Uhura – oh my God, don’t move.”

“What?” Nyota asks, glancing over, only to find Stoyer staring at her.

“That’s awesome,” Olson says, leaning past McKenna to stare at her, too.

“That’s huge,” Hawkins says, drawing back slightly.

“What is it?” Nyota asks, following all of their gazes towards her arm. The back of her arm, which she can’t see without twisting, and from the way they’re all looking at her, she doesn’t really want to find out what’s on her.

She’s a Starfleet cadet, she reminds herself, forcing air in and out of her lungs. And if it’s really gross and has lots of legs and, God, hair, she is really, really not going to freak out in front of a bunch of officers.

“Give me your shoe,” McKenna says, elbowing Olson.

“Use your own damn shoe.”

“Nah, that’s going to make a big mess.”

“Can you-“ she asks, really wishing someone would just help her. But she’s a Starfleet cadet and she can help herself and she’s going to do so any minute, as soon as she screws up the courage to actually look.

And then Spock’s standing over her and this time she doesn’t flinch when his hands touch her, even though they’re right there on her bare skin, because he’s brushing whatever it is into his palm and she lets out the breath that’s been caught in her throat.

“Ugh, squish it,” McKenna says.

“To hold one life above another is illogical.”

“But it’s a spider,” he says, grimacing.

“If you would like to debate the value of its existence versus that of a sentient being, I am more than amenable. However, such a discussion does not invalidate the fact that we and it can peacefully coexist in the same space.”

“What if it had bitten her?”

Spock looks down at her. “I am certain of her ability to overcome such an occurrence.”

She’s not entirely sure that’s actually true, because from what she can see of it, the thing is enormous and she feels a bit like shrieking just at the thought of it.

But Spock’s already placing it on the ground near the edge of the porch and watching, probably so that McKenna can’t enact revenge upon it for merely existing.

“Thanks,” she says, when he comes back over to her.

“No thanks is necessary.”

“Still,” she says, crossing her arms around herself and rubbing her hands up and down her arms, not only because she’s still cold, but also because she can’t help but feel like she should maybe check for any other unwelcome guests.

His gaze follows her movements. “I am going to retrieve another garment, if you would like one.”

“Oh, uh,” she says, then nods because she’s really freezing and that’s actually really nice of him. “Thanks, I packed a sweater.”

“Very well.”

“It’s in my bag.”

“I surmised as much,” he replies and she gives him one of his own raised eyebrows in response.

“I want mine too. Your coat as well, but also my sweater,” Stoyer says to Puri, who sighs, kisses the top of her head, and stands up to follow Spock into the house.

Spock hands it to her when he gets back and she gratefully shrugs it on, trying to ignore the way her mind is busy remembering exactly how she packed her bag and what else he may have seen while he retrieved it. He spares her from having to think to closely about it, thankfully, because he wanders off with Puri a few steps down the porch, their backs to the group as they stare out across the desert, so that instead of Spock next to her, Stoyer sits down.

“I’m surprised the Ambassador doesn’t just follow the two of them around instead of the actual couples,” Stoyer whispers and Nyota can’t help but smile and glance over at the two men again.

“They’ve always been like this?”

“I was pretty sure that if I wanted to date Puri, Spock would be part of the package. I don’t think I ever saw them apart from each other until I very, very explicitly told Puri exactly what type of relationship I wanted with him.”

“And he told Spock to scram?”

“Guess so. Or Spock figured it out, he’s kind of a genius.” 

“Definitely a genius. Maybe not one at Scrabble, though,” Nyota grins.

Stoyer stares over at them, a fond smile on his face. 

“Do you ever get the feeling that Spock doesn’t like you and is too polite to say it?” Stoyer asks, then laughs, shaking her head. “No, I’m sure you haven’t, I’m pretty sure Spock likes you more than he likes pretty much anyone he’s ever met.”

“You might be surprised,” Nyota murmurs, quietly enough that Stoyer doesn’t seem to hear her.

“Well, it’s just to say that he was not my biggest fan, not by a long shot,” Stoyer says, still shaking her head and staring into her drink. “That year that I started dating Puri, I mean. Though I like to think that he’s come around to me a bit since then.”

“Really?” Nyota asks, swirling her wine slowly in her glass and watching the way the liquid moves.

“Oh, I don’t think I would have ever really known, except that later on he warmed up so much that there was a noticeable difference. Or, well, warm up maybe isn’t the right way to put it,” the other woman laughs. “You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“And I don’t mean to say anything bad about him,” Stoyer adds, quickly, glancing over at Nyota. “He’s really… he’s been some of the best part of being with Puri, getting to know him and Puri having a friend like that.”

“I’m sure.”

They fall silent for a long moment and Nyota’s busy trying to imagine Spock as a cadet when Stoyer speaks again.

And this time there’s a huge grin on the other woman’s face. 

“You gonna meet Spock’s parents? The Ambassador mentioned to me and Puri that they’re coming soon.”

“Oh, that’s… that’s kind of… I don’t think that, uh-“ Nyota busies herself with her own wineglass, trying not to grimace at it and trying to wipe her mind blank of the image of cadet reds and Spock.

“Too soon?” Stoyer supplies.

“We’re not really doing the whole parent thing,” Nyota says, nodding quickly, that familiar guilt taking up residence in her stomach at the fact that Stoyer so easily believes that they’re actually together and as such, being introduced to his parents would just be part of that. “It’s a little… it’s a little much.”

“Hmm.” Stoyer’s still watching her and Nyota resists the urge to wince under that steady gaze.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing,” the other woman says, shaking her head. “Well, ok, it’s just that you two are so… and he… No, nothing, none of my business.”

“It’s a lot,” Nyota says, searching for something to say that’s true. “And it’s really only been this summer that he and I have been doing this, and before that I was in his class, and…”

“Sometimes the more serious it is, the harder things like that are,” Stoyer says gently and Nyota wants to correct her, wants to tell her that that’s not it at all, but she can’t. Instead, she retreats into her glass of wine, taking another drink and wishing that this hadn’t become so complicated that she’s sitting there with a dean, trying to remember what’s fact and what’s fiction about this mess she’s in with Spock.

He’s always so quiet, so withdrawn that when she looks over towards him again, she’s hardly surprised to find that he’s slipped away without her, or anyone else besides maybe Puri, noticing.

“Ever wonder why she’s all here alone?”

“Hmm?” Nyota jerks her gaze away from where Spock had been. Puri’s moved, too, only to go over and talk to the Ambassador.

“The Ambassador. Taele. If she’s so dead set on us being in a relationship, where’s her significant other?”

“No, I hadn’t really considered that,” Nyota answers, looking over at Taele, who’s eating a bowl of ground beef drowned in gravy like it’s cereal, and glancing around again for Spock. “Though I don’t know if her having a date would be better because she’d be occupied, or worse because there’d be two of them.” She pauses, then winces. “I mean, not that, uh, I didn’t meant to imply that I don’t-“

“I know what you mean,” Stoyer assures her, patting Nyota’s knee gently. “Not officially, of course.”

“Of course.”

Nyota keeps looking around and finally spots Spock through the windows, standing inside in the kitchen washing dishes. It figures, of course, that he probably couldn’t stand having them dirty, everyone else so occupied spending time together and enjoying the long summer evening to even think about them, but they would have niggled at him, gotten under his skin that they weren’t washed yet.

“I just wonder, you know?” Stoyer’s asking and Nyota pulls her attention away from Spock. “Why she’s like that? I get cultural relativity, all those theories – literally taught the class on it for a good few years – but she hasn’t exactly opened up about why she is how she is. Has she said anything to you about it?”

“No, not at all.”

“And she even followed you two around all day. Thanks for that, by the way, sorry to stick you with her.”

“It’s no problem,” Nyota says, since it isn’t, not really. She’s not here to actually enjoy herself, she’s here to help Spock get those crystals, beautiful vistas of the sun setting over the desert and glasses of nice wine not withstanding.

“You’ll do well in your career, if I had to guess,” Stoyer says like she’s reading Nyota’s mind and she swallows, hoping she isn’t being too transparent, but the other woman continues on easily. “Being able to handle that for a full day.”

“We went for a walk,” Nyota says and tries to keep her tone light. “Got away from her for a bit.”

“She didn’t follow?”

“Probably wanted to ensure we got some quality time together,” Nyota answers, though now she’s wondering what Taele did while they were gone, and thinking of their walk makes her glance at Spock again, makes her peer through the windows to make out his solitary form in the kitchen, bent over the sink like he is.

“Probably,” Stoyer nods, her focus still on the Ambassador. “I just really want to figure her out, why she feels the need to always be with us, except for everyone once in a while when she lets us be alone.”

“Lonely,” she says. She blinks and tears her eyes from Spock, since she’s looking at him again.

“What?”

“I was… I meant that I think she’s lonely, that’s why she does that, follows us around, wants us to be together.”

“Huh.” Stoyer squints over at the Ambassador. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m going to go give him a hand,” Nyota says, pointing back into the house at Spock and standing, grabbing her wineglass and heading inside before Stoyer can answer.

“Hey,” Nyota says and she knows he must have been able to hear her coming from the moment she stepped into the house but he only looks up from scrubbing the pan when she’s standing next to him. “Pike doesn’t have sonics out here to clean everything? How quaint.”

“I apologize,” he says to the sponge he’s holding, “For leaving you alone. You asked me to cease vacating such situations and-“

“Yeah, it’s no problem.” She grabs a dishtowel and runs it over a plate, the ceramic still warm from the water. 

“It was an argiope aurantia.”

“What?”

“The arachnid was an argiope aurantia, it was not poisonous. You would have at most suffered mild irritation that could have been ameliorated with a dermal regenerator within moments.”

“It was fine,” she assures him. “And I’m sure the spider is enjoying his stay of execution.”

“Her,” Spock corrects.

“Her,” she echoes.

She boosts herself up onto the counter and sits there, one leg crossed over the other and her heel drumming against the cabinet as she continues to dry the dishes.

“That is an illogical place to sit.”

“So?”

He just looks at her, then down at the counter, then turns back to the pan he’s scrubbing.

“It is unhygienic.”

“But isn’t drying dishes with the same towel that’s been sitting out in the kitchen all day also kind of gross, when you think about it? Wiping the same piece of fabric over everything that we’re going to eat off of tomorrow?”

He looks down at the plate in her hand, but can’t seem to come up with a response.

“How was your dinner?” she asks when he doesn’t speak again, or show any sign that he intends to.

“Palatable.”

“You should be a restaurant critic.”

He pauses in scrubbing a plate. “That was sarcasm.”

“Yep,” she nods. “You having the worst time ever?” she asks when he remains silent and she’d dried a half dozen glasses. “I could invent some type of emergency and we could go home.”

“No,” he says, but doesn’t indicate which remark he’s answering and she doesn’t push it.

“Will you-“ she starts, but she’s distracted by a loud laugh from outside, so that right in the middle of what she was about to say, she’s both looking out the window and reaching for a handful of forks, and her fingers bump against his. “God, sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, the words tumbling over each other. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to-“

Her entire hand feels warm and though it’s gone now, something had sparked and prickled over her skin like a strange tickle. She drops the dishtowel to rub her other fingers over her knuckles, which still feel weirdly tingly.

“Sorry,” she says, again, then picks up the towel and the small pile of forks he’s left on the counter, which is probably a better plan that actually handing things to each other.

“What were you going to say?” he asks without looking at her, after she’s dried the forks, and the knives, and three spoons.

“I was going to… Uh,” she starts, blinking at the spoon she’s holding. It’s dry and has been dry for a while now, she realizes. “Oh, I was going to ask if you’d traveled anywhere else on Earth.”

“Stonehenge.”

“How was that?”

“It was raining.”

She can’t help but laugh and she sets the spoon down, her hand still slightly warm. But her face is, too, and has been ever since they touched.

“Have you been to Victoria Falls?” she asks.

“No. That is near where you were raised, correct?”

“Talk about relative. Closer than here, still really far. Africa’s huge, most of our maps don’t really represent how big.”

“I have not spent much time there.”

“Except for checking out the Pyramids.”

“And the Sphinx.”

“And the Sphinx,” she echoes. He hands her the last plate and as she dries it, she tries to not watch his hands as he wipes down the area around the sink. “You going to go back outside tonight?”

He glances out the windows and she follows his gaze, watching McKenna open yet another round of beers and pass them out.

“Perhaps.”

“Best of five at Scrabble?”

She thinks that maybe he looks a little surprised that she offered, but he nods.

He definitely looks surprised when she pours out the rest of her wine and quickly washes the glass.

“You do not want more?” he asks and she shakes her head.

“I need my wits about me. Especially since after I beat you again, I might up the ante and offer to play you in chess.”

“The Captain has a set?” Spock asks and she hears a note in his voice that either hasn’t been there before, or she hasn’t noticed it, a tremor of excitement that makes her glance up at him.

“There was one in the cupboard when I got Scrabble out,” she tells him, feeling slightly self congratulatory that she correctly guessed that he would be partial to a match.

“Do you know how to play?”

“Nope.”

“You are willing to learn?”

“I am willing to beat you in it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I was not. You are overly competitive.”

“Too bad,” she tells him, following him over to where they left the Scrabble board that afternoon. “Get used to it.”

“It would appear that I have no choice but to do so.”

“Yep. You’re totally stuck with me.” She’s pulled a P out of the bag and has handed it to him before she realizes what she’s said. “For the weekend, I mean.”

“I am aware,” he replies and she doesn’t look at the way his long fingers reach into the bag.

“And to think we could have been back home doing work,” she says with a sigh because he managed to pull out a B. But her sigh is less wistful than it might have been because she has some really great choices when she draws her tiles and the first word he lays down gives her lots of options.

It could be better – Gaila could be there, she could actually have a real date to spend the weekend with, she could not be being stalked by an overbearing foreign dignitary – but all in all, she thinks, looking at him across the board, his features drawn in concentration, his brows furrowed together from the game not from her driving him nuts, it wasn’t really the worst way to spend a day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 12/28/2014: My friends, I am so sorry for the long delay. Finals were crazy – good but crazy (thank you for all your kind words and well wishes!), and then the holidays were full of food and family and less fandom then I would prefer. But, here is this chapter and the next are well on their way, plus I have an added bonus for all of you of just having posted a very fluffy, very charming (if I do say so myself), very short story called ‘What We Will Find’ that is not at all like this story, but hopefully fun to read in its own way. Thanks for your patience between chapters of ‘The Place Between’, I don’t anticipate any further interruptions the likes of this past one, and most important, Happy New Year to you all and I hope you have a lovely end of 2014 and beginning of 2015!


	13. Chapter 13

She wakes up to an incessant beeping and groans, burrowing deeper into the covers and pulling the blanket up to her ears, not quite awake enough to complain to Gaila in as many languages as she can muster for not turning off her alarm on a Saturday morning but awake enough to want to try.

But there’s no excited babbling, no Gaila telling her - without stopping for breath or to make sure that Nyota’s actually conscious - all about her previous evening, or a dream she had, or what she’s going to do that day. No talking and when Nyota blinks and opens her eyes, she doesn’t see the gap between her and Gaila’s bed but an expanse of crisp white sheets and a faded quilt. Not only that, the way the bed is too big and Gaila’s isn’t there, but the sound of Gaila’s alarm is off, the tone much more like that of a comm call, which makes Nyota blink and sit up enough to look around up.

The other side of the bed - Spock’s side and it is really, really too early in the morning to be thinking those words – is as neatly made as possible without having actually woken her up to finish the job. There’s hardly any indication he was even there and if it wasn’t for his comm and padd on the nightstand, or his bag with its perfectly folded clothes visible where it’s gaping open, she would hardly have known he had slept in the same room.

And his comm is the one that’s ringing, incessantly and she scowls at it like enough disapproval will make it fall silent.

Unfortunately, the only thing her ire seems to cause is the opening of the bathroom door. Spock takes the distance to nightstand in steps that are so quick - and she’s still so disoriented - that she very nearly doesn’t have a chance to absorb the fact that he’s in a bedroom with her at all, let alone answering a comm call, let alone dressed in a towel. Only a towel.

She blinks, clears her throat, and finds a good reason to be looking at the quilt. It’s beautiful, one of the old fashioned kinds that is made out of what feels like cotton instead of a synthetic fabric and after the fact that Pike’s house has running water instead of sonics, she thinks she wouldn’t be too far off the mark guessing that it might be hand sewn. 

She is also, utterly, unable to keep her attention on it and not Spock’s back, which he’s turned to her, or how that towel fits him, or the way lean muscles shift under his skin as he picks up his comm and flicks it open.

She’s not staring at him, mostly. Or is staring, but only a little bit. Or is just maybe watching him because how could you not, when your former professor walks into the room you were sleeping in, half naked, answers his comm, and is speaking on it in lyrical, beautiful Vulcan.

When the bathroom door shuts behind him, she can still make out his conversation because her hearing is all too good for this situation and her Vulcan far too proficient, and he really, really needs to stop because she had no intention, ever, of overhearing a conversation between him and someone who is, apparently, his mother.

He either drops his voice or hangs up or something because she finally can’t hear him speaking and then the water for the shower turns on and she lets out a long, long, slow breath, unsure of the last time it was that she inhaled.

Staying up too late trying to figure out the rules of three dimensional chess had her crawling into to bed, yawning, and asleep before Spock had finished playing Puri, who had sat down to finish the game when she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Being exhausted from the long drive, a day spent with the Ambassador trailing them, and calling upon every ounce of vocabulary she could in order to beat Spock at Scrabble had the added benefit of rendering her so tired that the idea of sleeping next to him had been manageable and something she couldn’t care about just then. Now, in the light of day and having him there – and in a towel – that reality seems so, so much more concrete. And immediate. And weird. And she really had never thought through the whole seeing each other in the morning thing, since just the idea of sleeping next to each other had been enough to absorb. 

His running shoes are sitting next to his bag, unlaced, and the pitch of the fall of the water changes as – she guesses since she’s really, really not thinking too hard about any of this – he steps under the spray and this entire weekend, the entire summer, her entire life leading up to this point was a giant, enormous, colossal mistake and she can’t for the life of her stop thinking about the hollows of his hip bones or the tightness of his stomach or how narrow his waist is or how the towel was slung so low or –

She throws the covers back, stands up, and focuses as thoroughly as she can on making her side of the bed, but she’s tired and her hands aren’t working right and no matter how long she spends it’s impossible to make the quilt and pillow as neat as his side is, so that by the time she’s done and has begun to sort through her clothes in her bag, the water has shut off again.

She’s left with the decision to not change and just sit there and wait for him to be done, only to have him find her in what she slept in – which had been innocuous enough when it had just been her in the room – or change and hope that while she’s in the middle of doing so, he doesn’t come out again.

She spends long enough looking at her clothes that she could have just put them on already without him walking in on her, then glances at the closed door, then strips off her pajamas and pulls on her clothes so fast that she’s surprised she doesn’t rip any fabric.

She’s staring out the window as she brushes her hair, wishing for a mirror and maybe a time machine so that she can go back and undo whatever it was that landed her in the current situation when she hears the door finally open.

He’s dressed, thankfully, and she realizes belatedly that he’s trying to get to his bag, which she’s standing next to.

“Sorry,” she mutters, twisting her hair around her hand and retreating to her side of the room, which really should not be something she ever had to think, that she would be in a room with him – a bedroom – with a side that’s hers and a side that’s his, since he was her professor, and people who she writes papers for, takes notes from their lecture slides, and does their reading assignments shouldn’t also be sitting down on the edge of a bed she just slept in and pulling on a pair of socks.

“I apologize if my comm woke you,” he says, his back still turned towards her and when she realizes she’s just staring at him sitting there, she immediately tries to focus on her hair again, looking down at the way her brush pulls at the strands instead of at the long line of his back.

“Yeah, it’s no problem, I should be up anyway,” she says before realizing that she has no real idea what time it is. Early, she thinks, glancing out the windows, except that looking at the window means looking towards Spock again and she quickly turns back to her hair.

The kitchen seems like a much more neutral place to be and when she finds him there after finally coming down stairs, she feels marginally more ready to deal with him.

“Did you bring work?” she asks him when she sees him on his padd, ready to slip it out of his hands and probably smack him with it, she’s so jealous. That and waking someone up with a ringing comm, in a towel, probably deserves a few whacks.

“It is simply the morning paper.”

“Well let me know if you find any good articles about xenoling,” she tells him and when he nods and doesn’t answer, just takes another bite of his toast, she feels a bit of normalcy slip back into her life.

Except that she can’t figure out the coffee maker. No matter how many times Nyota pokes at the keypad trying to get it to come up as an option, the replicator isn’t programmed for coffee. Instead there’s a machine sitting on Pike’s counter that is so old fashioned, so antiquated that she doesn’t even know where to start with it. Nobody else is up to help her figure this out, except Spock who’s sitting there reading the news and eating his breakfast and of course he doesn’t need caffeine in the morning because it’s probably illogical to need a stimulant in order to fully wake up.

What’s really illogical, though, utterly and unforgivably illogical, even more than needing coffee, is the fact that making it has to be this difficult. She finds beans – whole beans, not ground up – in the cupboard, which leaves her stymied for a long moment, wondering why anyone in their right mind who is also somehow qualified to captain a starship, and the flagship of the fleet at that, would think that this was a reasonable task to undertake first thing in the morning.

“Are you in need of assistance?” Spock asks and when she turns to him with the package of coffee in her hands only find that he hasn’t even looked up from his padd to ask her that, she considers lobbing it at his head.

It’d be satisfying, but probably wouldn’t crush enough beans to make them worth brewing, so she resists. Barely.

“I’m fine,” she assures him, instead, and sets about trying to find a coffee grinder.

“Are you certain?” he asks when she’s finally located it and is turning it over in her hands, hoping directions on how to operate it will somehow be revealed to her by doing so.

“Yep.”

“Truly?”

“Anything interesting happening in the Alpha Quadrant?” she asks him, finally finding a cord wrapped around the base of the grinder. It’s so quaint, plugging the device into the wall like that, and she feels like she’s been caught in some alternate reality, or maybe an old-fashioned holo-vid where everything is still powered by wires. An alternate reality where electricity comes from the walls, Starfleet captains enjoy antique houses, and she just slept in a bed next to her advisor. And then saw him in just a towel and found out exactly what he looks like without a shirt on.

“Define interesting.”

“You can figure it out,” she mutters, pouring coffee beans into the grinder. She flicks the switch on, the noise grating and jarring, but loud enough to drown out any response he might have made to that.

She has to look at the package of coffee again to figure out how much water to add and then realizes when she’s about to dump the coffee in that she remembers seeing in a movie, once, someone putting in a filter. They’re nowhere to be found, not in the cupboard where the grinder was, nor where she spotted the package of coffee, and not in any of the other drawers or cabinets that she opens.

“This appears to be quite the undertaking.”

“I thought you were reading the news,” she says, banging another cupboard door shut.

“I am.”

“How’s that going for you?”

“It would appear that despite the differences between the two pursuits, quite a bit more successful.” He pauses and when she turns over her shoulder, he still has his head down as he reads so he totally misses the way she’s glaring at him. “They are in the cupboard adjacent to the refrigerator.”

“I checked in that one.”

“Your earlier scrutiny does not invalidate my statement, nor change the fact of their location.”

She opens the cupboard again, harder than she probably needs to, and there they are behind a box of cereal – and who even does that, owns cereal in a box and coffee in a package, instead of using a replicator for breakfast like a normal person, not like a Starfleet captain determined to commune with the past.

She feels marginally better once she has a steaming mug of coffee in her hands and more like she can forgive Pike for his peculiar eccentricities. 

“Satisfactory?” Spock asks and she looks up to find him watching her.

“It’s good,” she admits. She takes one step closer to him, then another. “What are you reading about?”

“An innovative bioneural replication engine prototype that is being built on Omega Octantis Prime.”

“Fascinating.”

“Hardly,” he corrects.

“You found everything?” Pike asks from behind them and Nyota jumps, barely avoiding sloshing coffee on Spock’s padd. 

She’s standing close to him, really close, a lot closer than she meant to be, and she steps away automatically before realizing that she’s supposed to be so near to him. She starts to move back before registering that Pike’s been talking and she hasn’t heard a word that he has said.

“Sorry, sir?” she asks, blinking at him.

“I was just saying good morning,” he says and she’s glad his back is to her as he pours a cup of coffee, since it gives her a moment to take a sip of her own, the heat calming and steadying. “You two sleep alright?”

She doesn’t glance at Spock. “Yes, thank you.”

“What’re you going to get up to today?” Pike asks, leaning back against the counter.

“Oh, um,” she says, then takes a sip of coffee. “I guess I’m not entirely sure.”

She shoots a look at Spock since he’s in this with her and should bear half of the responsibility for coming up with suitable couple’s activities, but he’s still reading.

She’s about to poke his shoulder or maybe just snag his padd from him and hold it hostage until he helps her, when he finally looks up.

But all he says in “Unclear” and she has to take another sip of coffee so that she doesn’t let out the exasperated sigh that’s sitting in the back of her throat.

“Well, there’s a nice little town to walk around,” Pike offers.

“That could be fun,” Nyota says, because it could be. Probably not, since unless it has a library the likes of the Academy she’s not particularly interested, but it might beat sitting around the house all day.

“Till you go, Spock can I talk to you about some staffing plans? I want to go over our hiring schedule for the next couple months.” Pike stirs a splash of milk and a spoonful of sugar into his cup before placing the spoon in the sink, and she can’t help but notice how Spock’s eyes flick towards it, the sole dirty dish sitting in the kitchen.

His office had been immaculate the few time she had ever been there and his toothbrush – not that she had ever, ever wanted to be in a position where she knew what color his toothbrush is – had been sitting perfectly parallel to the edge of the sink, and he’s somehow eaten a piece of toast without getting a single crumb on his plate. She thinks about how foreign all of this must seem to him, caught in a house with so many humans with their habits like leaving a spoon in the sink that are probably completely exotic and unfamiliar to how he grew up.

Not that he hasn’t lived among humans since coming to Starfleet, so this can’t be all that jarring, but she can very easily imagine his apartment as a refuge where spoons are cleaned and put away post-haste in the most logical manner possible. His place is probably completely spotless, pristine, and impeccably kept, which isn’t all that different than the kind of room Nyota used to keep, before she’d gotten to the Academy and moved in with Gaila.

Spock’s looking at her and she blinks at him, trying to remember what he just said to her.

“What?” she finally asks, her focus still on trying to imagine what his apartment might be like.

“I’m stealing him,” Pike says and sounds like he’s repeating himself. “Sorry, but you can have him back soon.”

Spock slides his padd towards her before standing, washing his plate – and the spoon – and following Pike out of the kitchen.

She watches them go, the room feeling suddenly empty without them there and it takes her a moment to look down at the padd he gave her.

He left it open to a page that’s loading and it takes seemingly forever, whatever type of comm system Pike has out here apparently equally as ancient as everything else in his house.

When the headline of the article finally appears, she can’t help but smile, shooting a quick glance towards the door Spock disappeared through before she sits down with her coffee to read “Federation Council to Approve Increased Funding for the Andorian Xenolinguistics Department.”

…

“What, precisely, are we doing here?” Spock asks, looking up and down the sleepy main street of Mojave.

“Nothing. Anything.” She shrugs and joins him in staring around. “Not much, by the look of things.”

“Coming here with no purpose is illogical.”

“We’re seeing the sights,” she tells him, then nods back at where the Ambassador is trailing behind them, peering into shops windows like she’s on the lookout for a steak. “And be nice, we have an audience.”

“The fact remains that-“

“Exploration is a way for us to learn about the world around us,” she tells him. “Without doing a thorough survey of our surrounding environment, how do we even know what questions to ask about it, in order that we learn even more?”

She catches the way his mouth tightens and she grins at him.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Cause I find that sometimes I rather like logic,” she tells him lightly. “C’mon, there’s a bookstore over there. And how would we have ever found it if we hadn’t come here in the first place?”

It’s a pretty fantastic bookstore for such a tiny town and Spock can do whatever he wants because she’s going to take her time pursuing the titles and flipping through actual paper books that will set her back a happy hour or two with Gaila.

But it might also be worth it because they smell so good and Gaila’s not there to tease her about the fact that old books are pretty much better than anything and Spock either agrees or doesn’t find it logical to try to rush her, because he doesn’t bring up the fact that she can spend a really, really long time wandering among the shelves.

“Find anything good?” she asks him when she spots him in the back corner of the store, flipping through a book on the history of the Pacific Northwest.

“Define good.”

“Nah, you got too close to beating me at Scrabble, I’m not helping you out with any words.”

“You have a truly impressive vocabulary.”

“Careful, Spock, you’ll make me blush.”

“That was not a compliment but a statement of fact.”

“Well, I’m going to take it as such. Thanks. So sweet of you. I’ll remember you said that when I beat you next time that we play.”

“Perhaps you are simply clinging to such an affirmation as a way to assuage your disappointment with your performance at chess.”

“Maybe you’re only bringing that up because you’re so mortified you lost so atrociously at Scrabble.”

“I do not suffer from such emotions as embarrassment.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” she says with a grin. “I happen to remember that one of those games was short. Exceedingly short. Short enough that if I knew the average length of a Scrabble game I might be able to extrapolate the deviation from the norm and such a result would be-“

“As I have told you, you are extremely competitive.”

“Says the guy who wanted to keep playing,” she says lightly. “And if you think this is bad, you should see me with Kirk.”

Spock’s quiet for a moment, his attention on the book in his hands. “Do you often play such games with him?”

“What? No, I just meant in class and training sims and stuff.”

“Ah,” he says, carefully turning another page and smoothing his palm over it.

He doesn’t look up again and after a moment where she’s not sure if they’re going to keep talking or not, she finally just walks away and finds another section of books to amuse herself with.

“You getting something?” she asks when he joins her at the counter with a book in his hand.

“That should be apparent.”

“Someday, I’m going to teach you how to make small talk.”

“I await this event with great anticipation.”

“Together?” the woman behind the counter asks brightly.

“Nope,” Nyota answers, stepping aside so that Spock can pay for his book. 

“He’s so handsome,” the older woman whispers to her when he’s left the shop to go join the Ambassador on the sidewalk, since she hadn’t wanted to come in.

“What?” Nyota asks, looking up from counting out credits.

“Your boyfriend. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, of course.” 

Nyota glances out the shop windows at Spock, standing there in the sun, before quickly shaking her head.

“Not my boyfriend,” Nyota assures the other woman, checking to make sure that Taele is in fact outside. “Not even a little bit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Nyota promises her.

There’s not much else to do in town and Nyota doesn’t really want to head back already, only to sit around Pike’s house and wish for either her work, Gaila’s company, or a break from this entire mess. There is, though, an ice cream stand and that feels like a suitable treat for spending a weekend out of her summer vacation with her advisor, a host of officers, and an antique coffee maker.

“I do not eat ice cream,” Spock tells her when she suggests it.

“Shocking, I would never have guessed that.”

“After the number of meals we have shared and based upon the knowledge of my dietary habits that you would have been able to thereby gather, it would be easily extrapolated that-“

“Don’t get anything, then,” she instructs, squinting up at the board. “And don’t pretend that you didn’t know I was being sarcastic. Ma’am would you like some?”

“No,” Taele answers. “However, Commander, you must join in the experience, for the good of your relationship.”

Nyota doesn’t like to make a habit of touching him but she can’t resist rubbing her hand over his arm and smiling at him.

“Hear that, dear?” she asks sweetly, trying to ignore how his arm feels through his shirt. “What flavor do you want?”

It takes forever for Spock to choose one, which hardly surprises her. 

“Vanilla?” she asks, peering at the board and trying to expedite the process so that it’s not time for her classes to start and she’s still standing with him, trying to pick out a logical ice cream choice. “No. That’s too boring. Wow, a lot of these have chocolate, I don’t think I ever noticed that. Let me think. Caramel?”

“That sounds very sweet.”

“Yeah. No wonder you’ve never done this. Um, coffee?”

He shakes his head, also contemplating the list. 

“What is Cotton Candy?” he asks she points to a bright blue tub of ice cream. He looks like he’s attempting to not grimace. “Ah. That looks… formidable.”

“I once ate so much of that I threw it all up on my Grandmother’s white rug.” She does grimace and then laughs. “Never again. And you probably don’t want a bright blue mouth. Peppermint stick or Grapenut?”

“What is a grapenut?”

“It’s like this little, um…” she pauses and holds her fingers slightly apart. “Crunchy. I think it’s made from wheat, which you eat.”

“Is it not a nut?”

“No,” she says, smiling. 

“Then it does not come from a grape?”

“No.”

“Peppermint stick,” he decides.

“Cone or a cup? Cup, I’m guessing.”

“Please.”

She gets an enormous cone of chocolate for herself, which from the way Spock looks at it makes her think it would be his equivalent of someone ordering a bottle of whiskey in the middle of the day and then drinking it like water.

He pokes at his ice cream for a long time after they’ve sat at a picnic table.

“Just try a bite,” she encourages him.

“It seems rather cold.”

“That’s the point.” 

He tips his cup towards him, staring at it like it’s not to be trusted before taking the smallest spoonful she’s ever witnessed. 

“Good, right?” Nyota asks.

“It is acceptable,” he says, taking a second, larger bite.

She can’t really think of anything to talk about, which is fine because trying to contain her dripping ice cream is taking up most of her attention and the silence between them is more or less companionable.

She’s not really expecting him to strike of a conversation, so she’s surprised when he looks up from his cup and asks, “Have you chosen your classes for the upcoming semester?”

“I’ve thought a little bit about it, but I haven’t registered for any of them yet.”

“Have you spent any time considering working for the acoustical engineering department or serving as a teaching assistant for Advanced Morphology?”

“I would have, but I recently I’ve spent most of my brain power trying to make coffee.”

“Perhaps you should have expended energy more towards last night’s chess game, if your powers of reasoning are so limited as to need consideration of where they should be disbursed.”

She squints at him. “Are you teasing me?”

“I would not do such a thing.” He takes another bite of his ice cream, his eyes flicking back and forth between his cup and her. “You have not answered my question.”

“You haven’t answered mine,” she shoots back before biting off a piece of the cone and crunching on it. “But no, I haven’t thought more about it. Or piano lessons, if you’re going to bring that up, too.”

“I had not intended to.”

“Good.” She takes another bite of her cone, then works on eating enough ice cream so that it’s all level again. “Why did you ask, then?”

“I was curious.”

“Oh. How logical.” She glances up at him, then back down at her cone. “Do you have any recommendations?”

“I did not take many of the xenolinguistics courses as a cadet, so I am unable to provide much council.” He digs his spoon into his ice cream and takes a large bite. “However, if you have not completed your life sciences requirements, I may be of some assistance.”

“Oh God,” she mutters, busying herself with her ice cream again, rather than thinking of those courses. “I keep blocking out the fact that I have to take another one of those.”

“That is-“

“-Illogical, yep, I know, but I hate them.”

“Which is also-“

“Illogical, I’m sure, but I took Intro to Xenobio last year and…” She lets herself trail off and just shudders, which maybe he doesn’t understand as a gesture but she can’t actually come up with words for how horrible that was. “Am I going to end up as your student this semester if I sign up for any courses that would fulfill those requirements?”

“I am only teaching advanced courses.”

“You say that like you don’t think I’ll be in any of them,” she says, her ire inflating rapidly and she takes it out on her innocent ice cream cone, chomping down on the side of it.

“You have intimated that it is not your strongest subject.”

“I do fine in it,” she says and it comes out sharper than she meant it to, so that she shoots the Ambassador a quick look and considers touching Spock – maybe on his forearm or shoulder or somewhere innocuous – to smooth over the moment, but she doesn’t.

“I am certain that is so,” is all he says in response, his attention back on his ice cream.

“If I decide to take any, I’ll let you know,” she finally tells him after she’s eaten half of her cone and is dealing with the fact that melted ice cream is dripping out of the bottom. “Wouldn’t want to end up your student again out of the blue, that’d...” She pauses and glances at Taele again. “Be complicated.”

“What does ‘out of the blue’ refer to?” he asks after a long silence and she looks up from where she’s deciding if what’s left of her cone is small enough to just pop in her mouth whole.

“Suddenly.”

“Suddenly?”

“Like something falling out of the sky.”

“Is that a common occurrence?” he asks, looking up at the sky above them with an eyebrow raised.

“No,” she says with a frown. “Haven’t you lived here for- you were teasing me, you definitely were, don’t even try to deny it.”

“This food is less repellent than I would have thought,” Spock says, examining what’s left in his cup and she laughs, the tightness in her chest that the thought of xenobiology brings up easing as she watches him eat the last of his ice cream with a very quiet but very apparent enthusiasm.

…

She didn’t know the house had a basement until Pike sends her down there to grab a bottle of red wine that he wants to put in the pasta sauce.

“You have a pool table?” she asks him as she hands it over.

“I’m pretty sure that if I was Spock, I’d be telling you that you have excellent powers of observation,” he says with a wide grin.

“He does say that a lot,” she admits.

She doesn’t think about the basement or the pool table again until after long dinner, when it becomes clear that Olson and McKenna worked their way through most of the beer Pike had in the refrigerator.

“How?” Pike asks them, his hands braced on his hips and his head tilted to the side in a way that makes Nyota think he and Spock spend too much time together.

“We have certain things we’re really good at,” Olson explains.

“A particular set of skills that you should be glad you have amongst your crew,” McKenna adds.

“You couldn’t squash this out of them while they were at the Academy?” Pike asks Stoyer, who just smiles at him over her wineglass.

“I hear that the deans tried with you and after that spectacular failure, just gave up.”

“Downstairs,” Pike says to McKenna and Olson. “There’s more. Go. Now. And take Uhura, I have a feeling you two need a responsible party to accompany you.”

“Responsible?” McKenna asks her once they’re down there, that smile pulling at his mouth. Then he looks past her and grins wider. “Oh, awesome, Olson check it out.”

“M’busy.”

“Bring them,” McKenna instructs, and Nyota glances back long enough to see Olson sorting through bottles of beer in the fridge that’s tucked away in the corner of the room. 

“Want one, Uhura?”

She looks between the beer that Olson’s holding, McKenna, and the stairs leading back to the rest of the group. Spock and Puri are still at the dinner table talking, so beyond interrupting Spock with the one person here who he actually probably wants to spend time with, she’s at loose ends.

“Sure,” she shrugs, reaching out to take a bottle from Olson. “Thanks.”

“God, I haven’t played a while,” Olson grins as he drags his hand along the edge of the pool table. “Someone keeps us too busy on the ship to have any fun.”

“That’s Spock,” McKenna says to Nyota.

“Oh, I’m sure he does,” she answers. She holds out her bottle to McKenna when he walks over with an opener and she would really prefer that he didn’t put his hand on the neck of it when he opens it, since she can hold it still herself, but he doesn’t hesitate to do so and doesn’t ask if it’s ok. 

She doesn’t particularly like him touching her like that and retreats to the arm chair that’s in the corner of the room, perching on the arm of it as they start their game.

“Dammit,” McKenna sighs when Olson sinks his last shot. “That’s one, man, I’ve got you next time.”

“You pilots, you think you’re so-“

“You guys ok down there? Did you get lost finding the beer?” Pike shouts down the stairs. “We can send down an away team, I bet Spock brought a tricorder.”

“Coming!” Olson calls back.

He drags the beer upstairs, the bottles clinking together, and then it’s just her and McKenna.

It’s really quiet in the basement, the sound of conversation and laughter from upstairs not loud enough to fill the room and the silence feels oppressive and uncomfortable.

“You having fun?” McKenna asks, and she looks up from where she’s been studying her beer bottle to see him working the chalk over the tip of his pool cue.

“Yeah, it’s been a nice trip,” she nods, worrying at the label of her bottle, which has started to curl up on one corner.

“Cool.” McKenna puts the chalk down and reaches for his beer, taking a long swallow while Nyota works a little more of the label loose. “What’d you two get up to today?”

“We went into town, hung out for a bit.”

“Anything good there?”

“We got some ice cream.”

“Huh,” McKenna says, tapping his beer bottle against his lips before taking another drink.

“What does that mean?”

“Just wouldn’t peg the Commander as that kind of guy.”

“What kind of guy?”

“You know, taking you out to do stuff like that.”

“Yeah, well…” she says and when she looks down at her hands, she’s torn off half the label. “He is, obviously, since we went.”

“Sure, sure.” McKenna looks like he’s about to ask something else and she feels something in her tighten, unsure of what he might say about Spock, when he just nods towards the pool table. “Do you play?” 

“Not really.”

“Wanna learn?” he asks, swallowing another sip of beer.

She starts to answer that she would, then stops herself, looking at the beer in her hand, the one in McKenna’s, the relative quiet and seclusion of the room they’re in, and decides that she doesn’t really want to be there, that there’s just something about being alone with him that’s slightly off putting.

“No, thanks, I’m going to-“ she says, pointing towards the stairs. McKenna just gives her that smile – and really, does he not have any other expressions – and she’s so busy turning away from him and walking towards the door that she doesn’t see Spock coming through it.

She nearly runs into him and puts her hand out on the first thing she finds to steady herself, which ends up being his waist and she really, really shouldn’t be touching him there, shouldn’t have her hand pressed against the hard heat of his body, but his palm probably shouldn’t be pressed to her upper arm, either, warmth seeping through her shirt and washing over her.

“Sorry,” she mutters, stepping back from him before she can realize that no, she is supposed to be touching him exactly like that, supposed to be smiling at him and moving towards him, not away.

“What are you doing?” he asks her.

“We’re-“ she starts, nodding over at the pool table except that wasn’t what they were doing at all, not really, since she had been on her way out of the room, intending to find someone to spend the remainder of the evening with who wasn’t McKenna.

“Wanna play, Commander?” McKenna’s asking and she hears the words dimly, with some part of her brain that isn’t telling her hand to move from Spock’s side.

She clears her throat, wraps both hands around her beer bottle and waits for him to take his hand off of her, which he only does when he finally moves further into the room.

Spock looks between her, McKenna, and the pool table.

“I do not know how.”

McKenna quickly positions the cue ball in the middle of the table and lines up another ball between it and a corner pocket as he explains the rules.

“Damn,” he groans when he shoots but the ball stops a half an inch from falling in the pocket. “Well, that’s the idea anyway. Pretty simple.”

“You do not wish to play?” Spock asks her.

“Do you?” she asks and watches the way he glances at her, then at McKenna again, and then reaches for Olson’s cue. 

McKenna sets up another shot for him and Spock gets the ball in, but there’s something off about the way he’s holding the cue and she steps over to him, brushing her hand over his shoulder to get his attention.

“No, like, um…” She shakes her head, her focus on his hands and tries to come up with words for why how he’s holding it is wrong. “Just, uh-“

McKenna’s looking right at them and it’s not a big deal because she and Spock are supposed to be a couple, so of course she should be touching him. His hands. Touching his hands which is basically like making out with him and who even does that, walks over to someone and just kisses them like that, except that Spock did that night after that dinner and now that’s all she can think about, the heat of him against her face and how his mouth felt and his finger under her chin and she really, really needs to be focused on something else if she’s going to adjust his hands.

She thinks about Klingon verb conjugations, which are her favorite and which are quite nearly – but not totally – a distraction from how his fingers feel and how warm his hand is and those sparks and prickles that spread over her skin.

“Like that,” she instructs and quickly returns her hands to her beer bottle which by now has warmed up so much that it’s really not doing its job of being cooling and soothing against her palm.

“You wanna break?” McKenna asks and he reracks the balls.

“Pardon?”

“I’ll do it,” McKenna says, then swears again when he doesn’t get any balls in. “Well, whatever, you pick if you want solids or stripes.”

“What is the challenge?” Spock asks after he neatly sinks two striped balls on his first stroke, bouncing one off the far rail, and leaving the cue ball neatly positioned so that he’ll have no trouble getting a third one in on his next turn.

“It’s to do that,” McKenna says and for once he’s not smiling, which is good because Nyota’s started to get rather annoyed by it. “You’ve, uh, never done this before?”

“That is what I said.”

“Right.” McKenna nods, his lips pressed together tightly. “That’s, that’s, um, something, then.”

“It is what?” Spock asks.

“You get to go again, it’s still your turn,” McKenna says instead of answering.

“That is not equitable.”

“You’re telling me,” McKenna mutters.

“This is not a compelling activity,” Spock says after he’s sunk the last ball.

“I’m going to bring the rest of these beers up to Pike.”

Nyota waits until McKenna’s gone to shoot Spock a grin.

“Nice,” she says. “That was pretty awesome.”

“It was hardly inspiring of awe, as it was actually rather straightforward and uncomplicated.” He studies the table for a minute, his head tilted to the side in that familiar way of his. “I am curious as to why it is so popular a pursuit.”

“Not all of us can do vector equations in our head and then actually carry them out that precisely.” She hops down from where she’s been sitting and starts pulling the balls out of the pockets to re-rack them. “But, really, Spock, this would fit quite well with your image of the speeding, drinking rebel that you are. Throw in the piano and trips around the world, I’m surprised you don’t have women throwing themselves at you.” She grins at him over her shoulder as she pops the final balls into the rack. “Or, you know, you probably do and just won’t admit to it. I think that woman in the bookstore today was ready to ask you out.”

He doesn’t answer, just comes up behind her and turns all the balls so that the numbers are facing up and all the stripes are parallel. He has to reach past her to do so since she hasn’t exactly gotten out of his way and she watches the way his hand moves rather than look up at him because that would put their faces way, way too close together.

“Want to, um-“ She clears her throat and waits for him to move back once he’s done, but he doesn’t, and she can feel heat prickle up the side of her body where he’s standing. “Uh, play again?”

“Would you like to?”

She turns around to face him and starts to move away because he apparently isn’t going to, but then they’re standing so close to each other and she’s between the table and his body and it should feel strange or uneasy, to be caught there with him like that, but even though it’s making her feel a little rattled, a little overwhelmed, it’s not in a bad way.

He’s staring at her and he’s so close that to look up at him she has to tilt her chin up, and she’s just watching the way he’s watching her, his attention on her focused and heavy, when Puri appears in the doorway.

She jerks her gaze from Spock to find Puri grinning at them, his antennae waggling.

“Oh, oh, sorry,” Puri laughs, his palms resting on the doorframe and a smile stretched across his face as he looks back and forth between them. “I can go. Or you can. I’d tell you to get a room, but you have one.”

“That is not necessary,” Spock says and there’s suddenly distance between their bodies that wasn’t there before, cool air rushing over her where his warmth had been.

“You sure?” Puri asks and Nyota quickly takes a sip from her beer, rather than look at how his antennae are moving back and forth between her and Spock.

“Quite,” Spock says.

“Yep,” she answers.

Puri shoots them another grin before turning back over his shoulder, which gives Nyota a chance to smooth her hand over her hair, tug at her shirt and wipe her palm on it.

“Pike, you didn’t tell us about this!” he shouts up the stairs and Nyota can hear Pike laugh.

“You all are supposed to be explorers, I can’t believe it took you so long to find it!” he calls down the stairs. “This is going in your performance review.”

“And you think the Academy’s tough,” Puri grins, clapping Nyota on the shoulder. “You never knew that when you graduated, you’d be tasked with finding your way around your boss’ vacation home.”

“Glad I’m getting a head start on that assignment,” she answers. She wants to go, to get out of there, but the impulse is different than it was with McKenna, like she’s suddenly full of energy and being with them – with Spock – is making her restless. “I, uh - you two need your alone time, I certainly don’t want to interrupt,” she says lightly, backing towards the door.

Puri laughs and squeezes her shoulder before letting her go. “Arlene has taught you well.”

She slips upstairs, closing the bedroom door behind her and taking a deep breath. She turns on the faucet in the bathroom, splashing water over her face before pressing her palms to either side of the sink and studying the way water slides down the drain.

She can’t bring herself to go back downstairs and it’s late enough anyway that she just changes her clothes, brushes her teeth, and slides into bed with the book she bought that day, carefully trying to not think about the fact that Spock would be sleeping there too, just a few inches from her. 

She must be more tired than she realizes because she gets halfway through the first page and then wakes to the soft creak of the door and the bathroom light turning on.

“S’ok,” she mumbles when his footsteps come back into the room and he apologizes for disturbing her.

“You are sleeping with your book.”

“Human tradition, you should try it,” she says, blinking, then rolling over on her side and squeezing her eyes shut against the light.

“Is that so,” he answers softly and the room beyond he eyelids darkens slightly as he flicks it off.

When she opens her eyes again and looks at him, even in the dim light she can see he’s in sweatpants and a sweatshirt and judging by how out of place that looks against the fact that it’s summer, she’s half expecting him to pull on wool socks.

“You can turn up the heat.”

“That is hardly necessary.”

“You look like you’re going to turn into a popsicle.”

“That would be-“

“Let me guess, physically impossible?” she asks, then yawns and climbs out of bed and pads over to the thermostat, trying not to trip over anything underfoot that she can’t see. She turns up the heat as high as it will go, since that seems easier than arguing with him. She gets back in bed and tosses the quilt off of her side, feeling around in the dark for the sheet and pulling it over her in lieu of the thicker blanket as she hears the heater kick on.

He’s so quiet in comparison to Gaila, his footsteps hardly make any noise so that even when the bed dips under his weight, as odd as that feeling is, it seems less intrusive than having an Orion in room with her.

Try as she might, she can’t relax enough to fall asleep. He’s right there next to her and her mind, now awake, is buzzing and she feels really on edge and antsy. Not uncomfortable, but like she can’t unwind with him so close to her.

It’s just that he was her professor, she tells herself – again – and it’s weird to be awake with him in the dark like this, in a bed, under the blankets together so that she can feel the warmth of his body even with the space between them.

Escape pod, she can nearly hear Gaila say and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to remind herself of everything she had said while she was packing. They’re professionals and this is hardly the worst situation someone working in Starfleet could get themselves into, and if she’s going to be assigned to a ship and work her way up to being sent on away missions, she’ll have to get used to such strange circumstances.

That doesn’t help, though, because now all she can think about is the Enterprise and how badly she wants to be assigned to it, to get to keep working with all these people she’s met and to be on the front lines of Starfleet’s exploration.

And standing between her and that assignment is the rest of the Academy, which is hard enough without Spock reminding her that she hasn’t finished all of her science requirements. Her stomach clenches at the thought of having to take more xenobio and she only realizes she’s been chewing on her lip that hard when it starts to hurt.

“Spock?” she whispers into the dark, in case he might be asleep, even though she’s nearly certain that he isn’t.

“Yes?”

“You were talking with Pike this morning about staffing?”

“We were.”

“You guys are going to hire cadets right out of the Academy, right?”

“Indeed.”

“When you look at transcripts and applications, if there’s… if someone has a class that…” she pauses, wrinkling her nose at the ceiling and hoping that he’s not looking at her. “Because we don’t have other work experience, so it’s really just our grades…”

“You are concerned that your performance in certain subjects will adversely affect your placement upon graduation?”

She nods, her hair whispering against the pillow, and doesn’t bother how he managed to guess that.

“Yeah.”

“Your scores in xenolinguistics are exemplary. Unparalleled, in fact.”

“Ok, sure, but…”

“I would not expend energy upon anxiety over your scores in other areas, Nyota.”

“Really?”

“You would be a valuable addition to any crew.”

“You sure?”

“I would not say so if I were not.”

“Thanks,” she says, shifting deeper into the pillow and letting a smile play over her face, something inside of her going warm.

“It was a fact, not a compliment.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it wasn’t.” She stares up into the dark for a long time but her mind won’t settle down and she’s pretty sure he’s still not asleep, either, so she finally asks the other question that won’t leave her alone, not with the thought of having spent a weekend with the Enterprise’s senior staff. “Spock?”

“Yes?”

“If I do apply for the Enterprise will it… will it be weird? That we did this? You and I, I mean?”

It takes him a long time to answer and she wants to turn to look at him to see if his expression gives anything away, but she doesn’t.

“Many officers carry on personal relationships.”

“We’re not in a personal relationship,” she reminds him.

“Of course.”

It’s quiet for another long moment and she listens to his even breathing, the sound strangely soothing.

“So no, then, is what you’re saying?”

“I would not have an issue with it.”

“Ok, me neither.” She clears her throat, the sound slightly harsh in the calmness of the room. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to do well enough in my classes to get on board. And take piano lessons, round out the old resume.”

“If your resume is that old, you should consider updating it.”

“Very funny, Spock.”

He’s quiet again, which is fine because she’s used to these conversations with him happening in fits and starts.

“You are apprehensive about fulfilling your biological studies requirement,” he finally says and he must know her well enough by now that it’s not a question.

It’s easier to say into the dark than it ever would be if she had to look at him. “I don’t think I’ll do very well,” she admits, softly. “I know, I get it about what you said the other day that it doesn’t make sense to avoid things I’m not good at, but…” She pauses, staring up at where the ceiling would be if she could see it. “Well, whatever, you’ve never had to deal with that, never mind.”

She turns over, away from him, probably taking half the blankets with her but not particularly caring.

His hand is gentle, so soft and light on her shoulder that if she hadn’t heard fabric shift as he moved she might have never have known that he had touched her.

“You do not know that,” he says as he withdraws his hand.

“What’d you do, get a part of a question wrong on an Advanced Theoretical Subspace Physics exam during your first semester?”

“That was not what I was referring to,” he says and she’s about to point out that without him contradicting her, it sounds a lot like she guessed correctly, but there’s a funny weight in the air, a heaviness that isn’t always there between them and she stays quiet, wondering what he’s about to tell her. He doesn’t though, doesn’t share much of anything, just pauses for a moment, then says “I was recently faced with the fact that despite my xenolinguistics training, a cadet has a much more extensive vocabulary than I do and was able to use it to her advantage while playing Scrabble.”

“Yeah, well, I’m good at what I do.”

“Indeed.”

“I think there’s a joke in here about xenobiology,” she quips lightly when he doesn’t say anything else.

She turns over to face him as she says it, intending to make some remark about the fact that they’re lying in a bed together and had been talking about biology, and he’ll misunderstand it and she’ll have to explain, and he’ll tell her that she’s being illogical and she’ll just laugh and maybe roll her eyes and it will be normal – or what passes as normal and what works for them. But when she turns, she finds that the bed maybe isn’t as big as she originally thought because he is so, so much closer to her than she imagined he was. The moon, so innocuous the night before as it rose over the desert, is now streaming through the window and they really should have shut the curtains because now it’s falling over his face, silvery light playing over his features so that she can very clearly make out the way he’s watching her, that steady, even gaze that she’s seen from him so many times.

“Pardon?” he’s asking.

“What?”

“You were on the verge of making an ostensibly humorous remark.”

He has a really nice mouth. Which she’s not thinking about. Except that she is and his lips look really soft and they were, weren’t they, back when they kissed that one time outside of her dorm.

“It would have been pretty funny,” she hears herself assure him.

It feels like they’re caught on the verge of motion, paused together in the place between thinking and acting, hanging on the pinpoint precipice of a decision. It’s as if with every loud, pounding hammer of her heartbeat in her chest and with every one of his soft inhales there’s the possibility of movement, the chance that one of them will fundamentally alter what exists between them.

She waits for something, for some noise to jar them, some indication of what he’s thinking, but in the long moments of silence and their shared inaction, the time to have done anything seems to pass by, easing out of the room as steadily as it came so that the air feels heavy and rife with everything that might have been.

He doesn’t speak and she doesn’t either, not when she can see him draw back slightly, still staring at her in the dark, and not when he turns away from her so that she’s left looking at the long line of his back, the blankets draped over his slim waist and his shirt stretched across the hard, rigid muscles of his shoulders.

She’s grateful that his telepathy is limited to touch, so that if it takes her what feels like hours to fall asleep after that, it’s something she can dwell upon in the privacy of her own mind. He doesn’t have to know that she’s kept up not by the thought of classes and the semester and the overwhelming truth of what it means to be a cadet, but rather the memory of his mouth pressed against hers, how it feels when their hands touch, and the imagined potential of a night that had turned out differently than this one.


	14. Chapter 14

The coffee pot is full and smells amazing when she gets downstairs, and she reflexively glances around for anyone who isn’t Spock. 

But he’s the only one in the kitchen, sitting with his padd and his breakfast in front of him and she pushes a greeting past the funny thing her throat is doing at the sight of him.

“G’morning.”

“Good morning,” he responds, scrolling farther down the screen without bothering to look up at her.

“You sleep alright?” she asks as she pours herself a cup, then winces because she really, really doesn’t need to be bringing up their sleeping arrangements.

“Yes.” She puts the coffee pot back and stares down into her mug for a long moment before he speaks again. “Yourself?”

“Fine, thanks.”

He doesn’t respond and she takes a sip of her coffee, considering, before walking over and gingerly pulling out a chair at the table. Not next to him, but also not as far away as she might have.

She drinks half of her coffee before she asks him, “Any interesting news?”

“You have yet to define interesting.”

“Noun, though it can also be used as a verb when paired with an object. Origin late Middle English and derived from the Anglo-Norma French and Latine ‘interesse’ which carried the meaning of ‘differ, be important’. As the Old French connotation of interest meant damage or loss, the final T was added, leading to the modern definition which was adopted by Standard in-“

“-I need coffee before you finish, I can’t do this without having had coffee,” Stoyer says, coming into the room and grinning at both of them. 

Nyota clears her throat and ducks towards her mug as she takes a sip. “Sorry,” she says.

“We’re getting an etymology lesson,” Stoyer tells Pike and Puri, who have followed her in.

“A what?” Puri asks.

“Coffee,” Pike grins, grabbing a cup and holding it out so that Stoyer can pour him some. “Thanks.”

“Nothing,” Nyota says when they all turn and look at her. Spock’s looking at her too, one eyebrow raised and his hand hovering over his padd like he’s forgotten it’s there. “Never mind.”

“You just know all that off the top of your head?” Puri asks. “And shove over, you two can’t pig the whole table.”

“Hog, dear,” Stoyer corrects.

“Sow?” he asks. “Boar? Hmm, tasty.”

Nyota slips into the seat next to Spock and wraps her hands around her mug, watching the steam twist and curl.

Everyone starts talking as they make their breakfasts. Not Spock, who’s sitting there as silently as she is, but the rest of them, which is fine because it drowns out the fact she doesn’t know what to say.

It seems to strange to keep talking to him like she might have if nobody else was around and she’s not awake enough to try to deal with the fact that she’s supposed to be acting like his girlfriend, especially since last night was… something. A weird something. Or an unexpected something. Or a something that was just really, really different than what’s normally between them.

There are so many men she knows who might have used last night as an opportunity, as an opening to make a move on her and he hadn’t.

She doesn’t know what to make of that, not really. Maybe he’s never had sex, though that doesn’t seem likely at all. Maybe he doesn’t find her attractive. Maybe he also doesn’t want this to get complicated. 

Maybe, her brain supplies as one final option no matter how desperately she tries to not listen to herself, he hadn’t fully calculated what her reaction would be and he wasn’t going to act without being certain.

And that feels… good. Safe. Right. Like she can trust him and that whether he’s interested in her or not, he would have never put her in the position of wanting to turn him down when she was stuck in a room – a bed – with him.

Because would have said no, definitely. Or yes. Or that they should talk about it. Or that they should stop. Or she would have just gone with it and dealt with the repercussions later, letting her fingers skate through his hair, allowing her knees to come up and grip his waist as he pushed against her, into her.

Or she might have just leaned over and kissed him, might have slid closer, spread her hand over his cheek and pressed her mouth to his and she can’t help but imagine what his weight on her would feel like, pressing her down into the mattress, his mouth warm and insistent as their hands played over each other.

“You ok?” Puri asks and Nyota blinks at him, startled to find that he’s sat down in the chair next to her.

“What?”

“You seemed out of it for a second,” he says and makes like he’s going to reach for her forehead and she can’t place why he would and why he’s so concerned before she remembers that he’s a doctor. Of course, he’s a doctor and Spock is her advisor and she doesn’t need to be thinking about what he looks like without a shirt on or how his skin would feel under her hands, how his neck would taste and whether she could drag a sound out of him, get his breath to hitch and his eyes to fall closed.

“I’m good, I’m good, I’m going to go running.”

“Want a bit to eat first?” Puri asks. “Or at least a glass of water? It’s hot out there, I don’t want you getting dehydrated.”

“No. Yes. I mean I’m fine, really, thank you.”

“Fuck,” she says once she’s alone, far enough from Pike’s house that she’s already out of breath. She pauses at the top of a small rise and says it again to the mountains in the distance, to the wisps of clouds, to the packed trail under her running shoes and for good measure to the house that has disappeared behind her. She’s already sweating and it’s hot, scorching, achingly hot out, and she kicks at a small rock in the patch, watching it skitter away.

She can’t stop thinking about the night before and she firmly tells herself that none of it matters, anyway, because nothing happened and nothing will happen because that was really it. They’ll drive home today and the semester’s starting soon and dilithium crystals or not, her paper will be done. She has never had any real intention of letting this drag on into the term, not when she has her classes to worry about. She’s never had time nor the inclination towards making room for a boyfriend, let alone a fake one. Let alone one who stares at her from the other side of the bed, one she can all too clearly imagine running her hands over, her fingers tugging at his clothes, and the way it might feel with his body pressed against hers.

“Fuck,” she tells the rock, too, then scrubs a hand over her face, drags it along the back of her neck, and starts jogging again, counting her breaths, her footsteps, the number of times she wishes she’d had breakfast so that she doesn’t think about Spock.

…

He has the good grace to make himself absent while she showers and the heat of the water combined with her run make her feel marginally better. When she comes downstairs to find something to eat, he’s sitting at the table with Olson, Pike, and Taele, their heads bent together over a padd, which gives her a perfect opportunity to continue to avoid him so that she doesn’t interrupt.

Instead, she makes herself a bowl of oatmeal and eats it standing at the counter. Spock left his padd there and she filches it, scrolling through the news. It’s not until she’s scraping the bottom of her bowl and reading about a new Federation economic policy – her mind fully focused so that it doesn’t wander like it wants to - that she actually processes what they’re talking about, Taele’s firm tone cutting through her concentration on what she’s reading. 

“We will go now,” Taele says. “At once.”

“Now?” Pike echoes. “Because tomorrow would really be-“

“No delays.”

“I’ll take her,” Olson offers. “You can stay, sir, and enjoy the rest of the day.

“No,” Taele says.

“I am able to as well,” Spock says and Nyota feels him glance over at her.

“Where are we going?” Puri asks, walking into the room and glancing around as his antennae dart towards each member of the group

“He will join the Commander and I, as will the Cadet and the Dean. No other members of your crew are necessary.”

“No, no,” Pike says, shaking his head. “Uhura can’t go, I’m sorry – sorry Uhura –“ he calls over to her. “And Arlene can’t, either, not yet. Maybe in a few weeks once we’ve had our next security inspection and gotten more of the ship squared away. Necessary personnel only right now.”

“Then the Doctor and the Commander will be sufficient.” Taele stands and steps away from the table without bothering to push her chair in. “We will leave as soon as possible.”

“Better not let Spock drive,” Puri grins, clapping him on the shoulder. “Not if we want to get anywhere in a hurry.”

They do end up taking Spock’s car, though, since otherwise someone else would have to bring it back to the city. Nyota feels out of place and like she’s in the way as they all begin gathering their belongings, until Stoyer finds her.

“I can take you back,” Stoyer offers. “I might as well try to get some work done this afternoon anyway.”

“Let me get my stuff,” she responds, not exactly wanting to hang around Pike’s house if she doesn’t have to, and especially if Spock is going to be gone.

Spock is just zipping up his own duffle when she gets to their room, all of his belongings gone from the bathroom and the nightstand.

“This is great, right?” she asks, starting to gather her own things. “She must be getting closer to considering supplying the dilithium crystals.”

“It would appear so.”

“Well, enjoy the trip up to the ship,” she offers when he pauses at the door and looks back at her. “And the time with Puri, that’ll be fun.”

He doesn’t even bother to correct her about the fact he would never do anything resembling having fun, just slings his bag over his shoulder and picks up his comm.

The door isn’t completely closed, just resting lightly against the jamb, and she can hear the chatter of everyone downstairs, and the softer sounds of Stoyer and Puri talking in hallway outside their rooms. Spock is quiet, but he nearly always is except for those few times conversations have flowed easily between them, which are always rare and sporadic occurrences. 

Now, he has his hand wrapped around his comm and he’s standing between her and the door, just looking at her.

She can’t help but wonder what might happen if he were staying that morning, if they were driving back together, or if she was forced to say goodbye to him with everyone else looking on, rather than alone in their room.

That image draws a fuzzy, hot blank in her mind and she hears herself swallow, the motion working past something hard that’s lodged in her throat.

“See you later,” she gets out, which is funny because she actually has no idea when she’ll see him again. The coming week sometime, probably, to go over her paper again, but even then she’s written enough that she can just send it to him and they might not have to meet up in person.

She waits for him to say something but he’s just watching her, looking at her for a long moment before nodding, murmuring goodbye, and disappearing out into the hall.

She stands with a shirt clutched in her hands as she hears Puri head down after him, and then the front door close behind all three of them and Spock’s car start and pull out of the driveway. 

She folds it carefully, smoothing out each and every wrinkle before settling it in her bag, not questioning or answering to herself why a knot rises in her throat, or why the house feels suddenly so quiet, when she should just really be relieved that he’s gone, everything that was bizarre about the weekend now behind them, and she’ finally heading home.

Still, she feels a little hollow, a feeling that persists as she says goodbye to everyone, thanks Pike, and follows Stoyer to her and Puri’s car, the spot next to it where Spock had parked conspicuously empty.

“The life of a Starfleet officer,” Stoyer sighs, buckling her seat belt and flipping on the radio.

Nyota just nods, watching Pike’s house fade behind them.

She spends the first part of the trip wondering if they’ll catch up to the other car on the highway since Stoyer apparently doesn’t feel Spock’s compulsion to go exactly the speed limit, then belatedly realizes there are closer Starfleet bases than San Francisco to beam up to the ship from, and stops trying to catch sight of a car ahead of them that’s black and sleek and in pristine condition.

“So what classes are you thinking about?” Stoyer eventually asks, casting a look at her and Nyota shakes herself out of her daze.

“That’s funny, Spock was just asking me that yesterday,” she says, drawing her attention back to what’s happening around her, rather than letting her mind drift towards the night before, since it keeps doing so without her permission.

“Well, I’d want to know, too, if I was trying to date a cadet,” Stoyer says, then pauses. “I was trying to date a cadet. For years. It’s tough, I don’t envy you two going through that until you graduate. The stress we put on you… Well, it’s necessary, of course, for your training or we wouldn’t do it, but it certainly cuts into your ability to have a personal life.”

“It’s not-“ Nyota starts, then stops and presses her lips together. They won’t be together during the semester so Spock hardly has to worry about her schedule, but she can’t exactly tell Stoyer that.

“It’s hard, I know,” Stoyer says gently and reaches over to touch Nyota’s knee, shooting her a small smile. “And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s fine, really.”

“And you two will do great,” Stoyer continues and Nyota just really, really wishes the other woman would stop. “Spock is so patient. Puri isn’t always like that, I’ll have to have Spock give him some lessons.”

“I like Puri a lot,” Nyota tells her because that just seems easier than tackling any part of what Stoyer just said. “And, uh, I’m thinking about taking Cardassian Orthography and probably Histories of First Contacts.”

“I’ve always wondered if we should require that in second year and leave the fall of third year free for another elective.”

“Oh, maybe,” she agrees. “I had also thought about taking Away Mission Practicum but I’m not sure I can fit it in my schedule.”

“Wait until next year anyway,” Stoyer suggests. “Trysher’s coming back from her posting on the Outer Rim and will be teaching it, and she’s much better than Franklin.”

Nyota can’t help but smile.

“Are you allowed to say that?”

“No,” Stoyer answers with a mirroring grin of her own. “Don’t tell anyone. And listen, I meant to say this earlier, but that was something else how you could rattle off the entire history of a word this morning.”

“I’m weird,” Nyota says with a laugh, waving her hand in front of her face. “That was… I didn’t mean for all of you to hear that.”

“Just Spock?” Stoyer grins. 

Nyota opens her mouth to disagree, except that she can’t because it’s true that she only meant for Spock to hear, and she can already half imagine him correcting some fact or asking if what she said was accurate in that way of his that used to be so annoying and now just feels normal and commonplace between them.

“Just Spock,” Nyota confirms, wondering what he might have said if they had gotten a chance to finish their conversation.

“No wonder he likes you,” Stoyer says. “And let me tell you, Puri thought…”

“Puri thought what?” Nyota asks when Stoyer doesn’t finish the sentence. She’s unsure of what’s stranger, the fact that Stoyer and Puri talked about her and Spock, or that Stoyer’s now telling her about it. And that’s really something, isn’t it, riding in a car with Dean Stoyer who Nyota used to be half terrified of – and is definitely still half in awe of – and who apparently wants to gossip with her.

“Puri was surprised when you two started dating, that Spock had found someone,” Stoyer finally says. “He called me right away. I was in a meeting and I had six missed calls from him.” She laughs softly. “I thought someone had died. Little did I know that the big news was that Spock had finally asked someone out.”

The idea of Spock asking her out is so amusing that she nearly snorts, and she presses the back of her hand to her mouth to still any inappropriate noises. The notion that he would have been perusing her back at the beginning of the summer is laughable and so crazy that it’s easy enough to dissuade Stoyer from thinking that could possibly be the truth. 

“Oh, he didn’t. Are you kidding me? I had to ask him three or four times. It was like pulling teeth.”

And it was, wasn’t it, despite the fact that she’s leaving out the all-important part of the story where she wasn’t actually asking him on a real date.

“You asked him?” Stoyer turns away from the road to quickly glance at her. “Of course you did, he probably would have just had a thing for you for two or three years and never said anything, ever.”

“Or five or six, knowing him and his communication skills,” Nyota says before remembering that she really shouldn’t be encouraging this line of discussion, since it skirts too close to the blurred boundary of what’s true and what isn’t.

“Not the best at communicating?” Stoyer grins. “Good thing he met up with you, then. Puri shouldn’t have been so shocked.”

“I cannot imagine him doing this with anyone else,” she says, which is certainly honest, because anyone in their right mind who wasn’t so blindly dedicated to their paper and willing to endure everything that has been ridiculous and awkward and strange about this summer would have turned tail and run, probably after their first trip to that cafe. But she’s still here and he is too, for better or for worse.

“I bet he’s really sweet,” Stoyer’s saying and Nyota glances over at her.

“Sweet?”

“Thoughtful, he seems like the type.”

It’s pretty weird to hear a dean talk about her ostensible boyfriend like that, but if people are going to make conjectures as to what Spock is like to date, at least Stoyer is better than McKenna, so Nyota just shrugs.

“He’s… himself. Always.”

“He must do nice things for you, I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t.”

“We don’t really… we work a lot,” Nyota says carefully, trying to cast about in her memory for anything that hasn’t been work. That dinner that one time, at the Vulcan restaurant, which was actually a pretty nice night.

“Well, that only makes sense for you two.”

“Yeah,” Nyota answers to the window, staring out at the landscape whizzing past. She chews on her lip for a moment, debating whether she should share this with Stoyer before deciding that it can’t hurt. “He, uh, brought me some research one day instead of flowers.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did,” Nyota confirms and can’t help but smile. “He’s so…” She laughs and shakes her head, still staring out the window. “Like I said, he’s so himself, you know?”

“I do,” Stoyer says and when Nyota glances over, the other woman is smiling, glancing back and forth between Nyota and the road. “It’s just so nice to see Spock like this, especially after-“

“After?” Nyota prompts when Stoyer cuts herself off.

“Uh, nothing. This is why I’m in administration, not Intelligence. They’d kick me out on day one for saying too much.” Stoyer shakes her head and stares down the road. “Nothing, nothing.”

Nyota bites at the inside of her cheek, debating. It’s none of her business, at all, and she really, really shouldn’t even ask, or wonder, or let her mind wander, and just when she’s resolved to keep her mouth shut, she blurts out “As in his ex? On Vulcan?”

“Oh, God, yes, I’m glad he told you, I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about this for ages and Puri is no help at all,” Stoyer says, then mutters something that sounds a lot like ‘men’.

Nyota picks at her thumbnail for a long moment. “He hasn’t really said anything about it, I don’t know that much.”

“I’m not surprised,” Stoyer says. “But trust me, him now? So much better. Happier, if you can use that word with him.”

“I can almost hear him now, arguing that he’s not,” Nyota says and finds herself grinning at the thought of his ire if someone told him that he was happy.

“Let’s go with content, then,” Stoyer says and gives Nyota a soft smile. “More at ease.”

Nyota’s not at all at ease, even a little bit, since now all she can think about is his ex and his friends watching him go through a breakup. And the fact that he’s less troubled now than he was is not something she ever needed to know about him because this was only supposed to be professional and she’s not exactly in the habit of learning about her professor’s personal lives.

But, she thinks, staring out the window again, it is nice to think that enough time has passed since whatever happened that he’s begun to heal from it.

They lapse back into silence after that, which is good because Nyota really, really doesn’t need to be talking about Spock like he’s her boyfriend. He’s her advisor and at the end of the day, that’s it. She should have never seen him shirtless, should never have slept in a bed next to him for two nights, and should never have come to know him as well as she has, his quiet humor or what food he likes or the fact that he’d never had ice cream until he tried it with her.

It was never supposed to be like this and the most she can hope for is that returning to the Academy will mean returning to normal. Seeing him less, even though that thought seems strange after an entire weekend in his company. Not spending as much time with his friends and coworkers, except that she’s come to like them quite a bit. Stepping back from the details about his life that she’s learned, despite how interesting they all make him, fleshing him out as a person so that she can clearly see him as a teenager chafing under the rigidity of Vulcan culture and as a new cadet at Starfleet, finding his own way.

She can only imagine what that would have been like for him, to get to Earth and live among humans with how reserved he is and how he isolates himself, not to mention being one of the only – if not the only – Vulcans to be serving in Starfleet. And not only Vulcan, but half-Vulcan at that. To be so different, always, and to never have a respite from that except among the few – very, very few – who he counts as friends, even though he won’t call them that. And to, apparently, not have a girlfriend to share any part of that with, or the partner he had on Vulcan to rely on for support.

She tries to imagine what Spock’s ex would have been like and can’t, no more than she can imagine him in a long term relationship with either a human or a Vulcan. He’s so closed off and so reticent to share that the idea of him letting someone into his life seems like something he’s never done, a skill he’s never practiced and is unused and undeveloped.

“Can I ask you something?” Nyota says to the window.

“Of course. Unless it’s about who’s teaching Intro to Theories of Command this coming semester, because that is the biggest headache I’ve ever had and that’s taking into account the time that O'Heron wanted Iavarone’s office.”

“No, it’s…” She takes a deep breath and lets it out because this, too, isn’t supposed to be something she wonders about. But it’s not, not really, at least how it pertains to her and Spock, because she’s really much more interested how Puri has made it work and Stoyer along with him. “What’s it like to be in an interspecies relationship for so long. Is it… hard? Or difficult?”

She feels Stoyer glance over at her, the motion quick and abrupt like the other woman’s surprised. 

“Well, yes, sometimes, but more so than another relationship?” Stoyer pauses for a long moment. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

“Oh.”

“We want to have kids, but we don’t know if we can.” Nyota shifts to look over at her and finds Stoyer rubbing at her forehead with the hand that’s not on the wheel. She shoots Nyota a slightly bashful smile. “Please don’t tell anyone that, though. Or, well, anyone other than Spock because I’m pretty sure Puri gives him the play by play down the minute of our marriage.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that, having a kid,” Nyota says.

“Well, it’s pretty far off for you two,” Stoyer says with a soft laugh and Nyota wants to correct her that it’s not only far off, but it’s also a certainty to never, ever happen, but she can’t. “And, actually, I called Spock’s mom. She’s wonderful and you’ll love her, whenever it is that you two meet.”

“You talked to her about…” Nyota starts, then trails off, trying to picture what Spock’s mother would be like and summarily failing. Human, is all that she can come up with.

“Oh, just about everything. What it was like to raise a child who had two totally different heritages, what it was like to try to get pregnant when it was unclear if it’d even work, or how Spock would end up being, and if he’d be healthy, all of that.”

“You must know her pretty well.”

Stoyer smiles softly. “A little bit. Spock gave me her number and said that I had questions, getting in touch with her was only logical. I think she just wants to talk about it with someone, and she was so sweet to share. Not many of us try to do this with someone so incredibly foreign.”

The car is quiet again and it’s only because she’s been staring out the window with such focus as her mind churns over what Stoyer said that she realizes they just passed the spot where Spock had pulled over. She can’t help but stare at it, watching it zip past behind them.

“Have you talked to Spock about it?” she asks Stoyer. “What it was like for him to grow up like that?”

“And have him sit there silently and then change the subject?” Stoyer asks with a laugh. “He’ll talk about it with Puri sometimes, and he’s said enough that we’re both fairly terrified of being able to raise a kid. Though at least we don’t have the issue of logic and how strict Vulcan culture is to compound everything. I don’t know how his parents did it, raising Spock to be the consummate Vulcan like that.”

“Consummate?” Nyota echoes, turning away from the window and thinking back on everything she’s learned about him over the last few days. “Hardly.”

“Really?”

“Really. He has a rebellious streak a mile wide.”

Stoyer laughs and grins at Nyota. “Really, really? God, who would have ever thought.”

“He does a good job keeping it under wraps. Though I admit that I kind of thought he got up to all of that with Puri and that you’d know.”

“Well, I was a faculty member when they were cadets, I’m sure there’s plenty that they didn’t tell me. And, gosh, to think of all the times my coworkers lamented that Spock was so boring, back when he was single and they couldn’t stop talking about him. If they knew that, I think they wouldn’t have been able to keep themselves away from him.” Stoyer pauses, then grimaces. “Uh, not that… Um. Sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that, I’m sure he wouldn’t… I mean, it’s not like he was interested in any of them even when he was single and now you’re around and he’s… You and I both know that he’s not like that.”

“It’s fine,” Nyota says lightly, though she doesn’t mention that he’s still single now, no matter what everyone thinks. 

“Well, that just means you were the first to get him to loosen up enough to tell you that. I admit, I didn’t think it’d ever happen after everything with T’Pring, for him to find someone to be so comfortable with.”

It’s a Vulcan name, a woman’s name from the prefix, and Nyota just barely keeps herself from repeating it out loud. T’Pring, Spock’s ex-bondmate. Ex wife, almost, since the connotations are nearly similar, or fiancé in the direct translation to Standard. The woman with whom he would have had children someday, lived with, built his life with and grown old with.

Quarter human children, she thinks, glancing over at Stoyer again, since no matter what he did, if he wanted to get married and have children that were biologically his it’d mean an interspecies relationship. Either a quarter Vulcan or a quarter human, or maybe something else entirely if he had gone that route.

“I think it’s just easier for him to come across as Vulcan and not give any hint to his actual heritage through his behavior,” Nyota finally says, trying to turn her mind away from his ex since it’s so strange to think about him being in a relationship with someone. “And just let everyone think that he’s fully Vulcan, rather than opening up about what he’s really like and sharing that with people he doesn’t know well.”

“I’m sure it is. But to live like that?” Stoyer asks. “I’ve kind of always wondered – and especially since Puri and I have started to think about having kids – what Spock’s life would have been like if he didn’t look so Vulcan.”

“Guess it’s a dominant trait,” Nyota says and tries to imagine him looking like a human, but she can’t. So much of who he is seems to be that quiet demeanor, his humor and occasional discomfort and those moments when he’s teased her breaking through that armor like it has slight chinks in it. He’d be totally different, a completely different person than who he is, which makes her a bit sad to think about.

“It makes me think about tiny blue babies with adorable antennae,” Stoyer admits with a wistful smile. “God, I just can’t wait.”

“You two would be great parents.”

“Thanks. I get way, way too excited when I think about Puri as a father.” Stoyer pauses, then grins at Nyota. “Just you wait, you two have been together for a few months now? I’m already thinking you would have the cutest kids.”

“No,” Nyota laughs, shaking her head. “That’s… God, no.”

“Not yet,” Stoyer corrects.

She can kind of picture Spock with little kids. But not hers, of course, someone else’s because he was her professor and is her advisor and she doesn’t need to be thinking of procreating with the man, let alone the activities that beget such things as babies, no matter how often the memory of last night comes to the forefront of her thoughts.

“I have this roommate,” she says, instead, because changing the topic seems like the thing to do. “And she would have probably ripped the car door open and jumped out onto the side of the highway just to get away from a conversation about marriage and babies.”

“Orions are like that, I hear.”

Nyota’s thinking about Gaila, missing her quite a bit after so many days without seeing her, and imagining the kind of comments that she would have come up with had she been there this weekend when her mind finally works through what Stoyer just said.

“How do you know she’s Orion?”

“Gaila?” Stoyer asks and Nyota nods mutely, staring at the other woman. “She was at Captain Hill’s party, asking questions about having babies with my husband. You don’t forget something like that.”

“She was joking.”

“I know.”

But Nyota’s still shaking her head slightly. “I didn’t introduce her as my roommate, though. I never do, people tend to make really… They tend to comment on it.”

“I can imagine.”

The comments are all about how Nyota can stand to live with someone who is so focused on sex, how she can get any work done, what the weirdest species Gaila’s ever brought home has been, and more than once Nyota has wondered all those things herself – except perhaps the latter, which she can firmly answer was the guy with all the tentacles. But she knows Gaila and loves her, and complaining about her roommate’s habits to her actual roommate feels no different than when Gaila grumbles about Nyota turning on the lights at 0600 to start her homework. Nyota can’t help but bristle when someone else talks about Gaila and her particular idiosyncrasies and people seem to feel like it’s ok to ask those kinds of personal questions. Nyota doesn’t let them be in the position to do so, preferring to keep the fact that they live together private from most.

Spock knows, but he’d never say anything like that.

Stoyer’s looking at her again and Nyota just stares back, trying to work out how the other woman knows who her roommate is.

“Damnit,” Stoyer says, grimacing at the road. “I’m telling you, Intel would have me fired.”

“What?”

“I will just say that we wouldn’t put just anyone as a roommate for our only Orion cadet.”

“What does that even mean?” Nyota asks, crossing her arms and staring at Stoyer.

“That, like she said, she’s never been called into my office.”

“But that’s-“ she starts, feeling her face flush and a hot rush of indignity on Gaila’s behalf when both of their comms ring. She turns away from Stoyer to fish hers out. “I don’t know the ID.”

She flicks her comm closed without answer it, but Stoyer’s is still ringing.

“Problems of the position,” the other woman sighs. “Do you mind grabbing mine from my purse and seeing who it is?”

“Puri,” Nyota answers, reading his name on the tiny screen.

Stoyer sets the car on autopilot, holding out her hand and flipping her comm open when Nyota hands it to her. 

“What is it, hon?” Stoyer asks.

Nyota’s still a little rattled by what Stoyer said about Gaila and is only half listening to the conversation when the sharpness of Puri’s tone cuts through her thoughts.

“Spock’s at Starfleet Medical,” Puri half shouts over a clatter of background noise. “He’s in the ER. I can’t beam down, they used the last of the Enterprise’s power reserves to get him there. There was a problem with the power couplings and, and-”

He sounds half frantic, a dread in his tone that Nyota’s never heard and that, more so than his words, grips at her stomach.

“On my way,” Stoyer says, her voice firm and calm. “I’m going to have the Academy beam you over.”

“Hurry, his biology - and it’s summer and with everyone on vacation-“ Puri starts, then cuts himself off and Nyota can hear him swallow. “Arlene, hurry.”

“It’s going to be fine,” she says and her voice is steady enough that Nyota wants to believe her. Stoyer’s hand finds hers and squeezes tight and she darts a quick glance away from the road before edging the speed of the car up a bit higher. “It’s going to be just fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1/4/15: Ok, a couple things. 
> 
> 1) Yay for quick updates but this schedule won’t actually keep going like this because work is starting again soon (ughhh) 
> 
> 2) How many tropes and plot twists can this story have?? Lots and lots of tropes and plot twists. I know it’s frustrating. We’re getting there, though. And it’ll be worth it. And I’m sorry. Well, I’m not and I regret nothing and I have a lot of confidence about where this is all going, and this really just brings us to …
> 
> 3) This is a winding, long road of a story and as it keeps going it may be hard to tell when it will actually end because there are a few moments that could be the end, but aren’t (like watching the end of Return of the King and being like this is it… no this is it… no wait… wait… ok now??). It’s part of the problem of posting it as a WIP, because if it were completely published you would know when the last chapter is coming. So. This is not the end (obviously because poor Spockles needs some help) and the end is not any time soon and you will know that it is the end because it will say ‘The End’ at the bottom of the chapter. Also I will probably write a weepy, sappy note about how much I love you all and how much I’ve enjoyed sharing this, etc etc. I just wanted to say that now so that you could sit back and enjoy the rest of the story… or, you know, rail at me for it not moving fast enough (but please don’t!!! I was kidding about doing that, please be nice). If you need more info than that, feel free to leave a review, PM me, find me on tumblr (same handle), or drop me a note at psicygni at gmail.


	15. Chapter 15

It’s a little surreal, sitting there in Starfleet Medical in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room while Stoyer parks the car.

She can’t answer whether it’s because she just saw Spock that morning and therefore the idea of him being injured is just plain ridiculous, or if it’s the fact that she’s really not his girlfriend no matter how many times Stoyer reassures her that he’ll be fine, or if it’s the idea of someone as graceful and poised as Spock ending up hurt badly enough to be in a hospital.

So instead of thinking about it and instead of trying to process the medicinal smell of the room, the bustle of activity, or the other families and friends waiting for news of their loved ones, she stares at the tile floor and tries to keep her mind clear of anything, lest that panicky sick feeling rise through her stomach, pass through her chest and lodge somewhere in her throat like it keeps threatening to.

She’s counted thirty-six tiles when Stoyer walks in, her comm in one hand and her other hand gesturing towards a nurse. He hesitates, seeming caught between the directness of the gesture and the padd he’s holding.

“Find Doctor Puri,” Stoyer instructs, “And tell him that his wife is here with Uhura.”

“O-ok,” the nurse says. “But I have to enter this data?”

“Now.”

“Now,” the nurse nods. “Right now.”

He disappears through doors marked ‘No Admittance’ and Stoyer sinks into the seat next to Nyota. She still has her comm open and a voice rises through it that Nyota belatedly realizes belongs to Pike.

“-Locked down the coolant leak. Good thing Spock was there or all of Engineering could have been compromised,” he’s saying, his voice sounding strained. “Puri got down there ok?”

“He’s in the ER with the Commander right now.”

“Keep me updated,” Pike says and in the wild, rushing mess of thoughts that is Nyota’s brain, she finds herself wondering who outranks who, Stoyer as a dean or Pike as a captain.

“Will do,” Stoyer responds, then flips her comm closed with a snap. “You ok, Uhura?”

“Yep,” she nods, rubbing her palms over her thighs. “Thanks.”

“You sure?”

“Of course,” she nods.

“He’ll be fine,” Stoyer says gently and puts her hand on Nyota’s shoulder. That’s much, much worse than the other woman being on her comm and ordering nurses around. The soft touch makes something in Nyota’s throat threaten to ache and causes her stomach to tighten uncomfortably. “Just a coolant burn as he shut off the valve, but it’s hardly as bad as it could be.”

“He’s in the ER,” Nyota points out, since that sounds pretty damn bad for a Sunday afternoon when they all should have still been at Pike’s. Or maybe they’d be heading back by now, her and Spock trading quips and long silences in his car as the desert rolled by outside the windows. That would be nicer than sitting in a hard plastic chair, if they were driving each other slowly nuts, disagreeing about this or that, those gentle digs that feel very nearly comfortable at this point.

“He’s tough,” Stoyer says, squeezing her shoulder and Nyota wishes she would move her hand because having Stoyer touch her like that means that this is serious and it’s not supposed to be serious because Spock is supposed to be healthy and uninjured and as irritating as he always is, correcting her about some fact or other or reminding her that she’s being illogical.

Instead, she’s sitting there with a dean who’s studying her with a gentle expression, and she’s in a waiting room full of people who probably actually know the person they’re there for and she’s not his girlfriend, not even a little bit, not even close. He’s her research advisor, she’s his student, and nothing about what’s happening was ever supposed to be like this.

She clears her throat and smooths her palms over her skirt, rubbing out wrinkles that aren’t there.

Nyota counts fifty seven more tiles while Stoyer calls Puri’s supervisor and lets her know that he’s been called into the hospital and while she arranges for someone from HQ to pick up the Ambassador and get her back to her quarters in the city.

“Guess you don’t have Spock’s parents contact information?” Stoyer asks, jarring Nyota’s thoughts so that she’s unsure if she finished counting the tiles by the nurses’ station or not.

“What? No.”

“I’m going to see if I can get it from his file,” Stoyer says, rising from her chair.

Nyota has her hand on the other woman’s wrist before she quite knows she’s reached out for her.

“Is it that bad?” she asks. It doesn’t matter. She’s his student. She should be finding all of this out from a message in her inbox and the most it should affect her is that they would have to reschedule a meeting or two.

Her heart is hammering and she pulls her hand back when she realizes how clammy her palm feels.

“I’m going to let them know, leave them a message,” Stoyer says gently. “Anyway, I can just imagine Spock conveniently not mentioning this to them.”

If it was worse with Stoyer’s hand on her shoulder, it’s much, much worse with Stoyer gone from the room. She tries to count the tiles again but can’t focus well enough, then reaches for her own comm to text Gaila before remembering that it’s in her bag in the trunk of Stoyer’s car, and then studies everyone else in the waiting room until it feels too rude to keep staring like that.

The nurse comes back, casts a quick glance at the chair Stoyer vacated, then quickly begins copying information from his padd into a data terminal mounted on the wall. Someone’s comm rings and in the other corner of the room a doctor approaches a family that’s been waiting since before Stoyer and Nyota arrived.

Her chair is really, really hard. All the technology that goes into bridge officer chairs and those in labs and communication bays around ships and at the Academy so that cadets and officers can work all day without developing problems from sitting doesn’t seem to extend to Starfleet Medical and she half wants to get up and walk around for a minute.

Except that if she does, she might just keep walking, go back to her dorm and find Gaila and slip back into her actual life, her life that doesn’t include waiting in hospital rooms for Commanders who got coolant splashed all over them, because she’s not supposed to be there and none of this was supposed to have happened.

But her legs feel too heavy to move and her heart is doing something funny whenever she thinks about him and she bought that great book in Mojave which is still in her bag and she doesn’t want to leave it behind, and if she doesn’t wait for him, who’s going to?

She tries to think of anyone he might call other than Puri and by extension Stoyer. Pike, maybe, but by now he’s probably up on the ship. Captain Hill, possibly, but Spock has never mentioned her and if Nyota hadn’t ended up at that party she would have never known the two even know each other.

Puri, then. And Stoyer. Except that they’re married and isn’t that what Gaila’s always complaining about when her friends start dating people? That it’s never the same once someone has a significant other since that person gets a special place in their life that nobody else can touch, not even a close friend.

She doesn’t know if Spock’s ever been injured before because she’s not his girlfriend and she doesn’t know him all that well and they don’t talk about their lives, not really, not beyond what slips out occasionally in the moments when they’re not irritated with each other, so she doesn’t know if he’s just used to just going home by himself, having nobody waiting for him and having no visitors in the hospital.

Probably. Definitely.

The thought makes her feel a little hollow and makes that thing happen again that her heart is doing.

“Well you have one very irascible, illogically cranky and rather pissed off boyfriend to deal with,” Puri says and Nyota nearly jumps at his sudden appearance. Except that he might have been walking towards her for a long moment already, because the door to the rest of the hospital has had time to slide shut behind him and he’s managed to cross the entirety of the room to stand in front of her. And Stoyer’s next to him too, and Nyota’ not sure when she got there either.

“He’s ok?” Nyota asks.

“Well, I’m still considering giving him a few whacks with a baseball bat for being stupid enough to get coolant all over himself, but until he’s better I might be nice and use a pillow. Want to come back and see him? I’m sure he’ll be happy to see a familiar face. Or logically pleased or whatever it is that he’s calling it these days.”

She wants to say that he’s not her boyfriend and she’s not all that familiar to him but the words are caught behind that tight knot in her throat and her stomach is hurting too bad to try to swallow it down.

Instead, she nods and finds that she’s stood up without realizing that she’s done so.

Spock is always pale, but his eyes look huge and dark against the sallow color his skin has taken on, he has dark green smudges under his eyes that aren’t ever normally there and he looks slightly dwarfed by his hospital gown, like it’s swallowing up his slim body. Neatly folded sheets cover him to his waist and she can all too clearly imagine him fussing with them, arranging them perfectly and precisely despite the fact that his left hand and forearm are covered in thick bandages. There are what looks like more bandages covering the left side of his torso, hidden by the fabric of his hospital gown and she can’t help but wonder just what he was thinking trying to shut that valve off.

She’s supposed to be doing something, she’s pretty sure. Speaking or walking or carrying out some action, but her feet are rooted to the spot and she feels frozen, like her legs won’t and can’t move and she’s unable to do anything but stare at him when his eyes catch hers.

“It’s ok,” Puri says, his hand gentle on her shoulder. He gives her a little push and she takes one step and then another towards the bed.

“Hi,” she gets out, forcing the word past whatever it is that has taken up residence in her throat.

“Hello.”

“Well, isn’t this just heartwarming. Hand me a tissue, Arlene, these two are too much,” Puri says from behind her.

“You ok?” Nyota asks.

“Yes,” Spock answers and she can hear how raspy his voice sounds. He’s normally so articulate, his words so precise and clearly spoken and now it sounds like he’s having trouble speaking as distinctly as he normally does.

“Seriously, you two. Cool it, Spock isn’t up for this type of enthusiastic greeting.”

“Be nice,” Stoyer instructs.

“I am being nice,” Puri responds and Nyota can hear the smile in his voice. His hand finds her back again and he gives her another gentle push. “Go, it’s fine, he won’t bite, I promise. It’d be illogical.”

“As was beaming me down here,” Spock says and his voice is quieter than it normally is but that doesn’t hide the note of displeasure.

“Cranky,” Puri says to Nyota, pointing a blue finger and one antenna towards Spock. “C’mere, Arlene let’s show them how this is done.”

Puri wraps his arm around her shoulders and bends down to kiss her, but Stoyer’s laughing too hard to let him, shaking her head and smiling at her husband.

“Stop, stop,” she grins, batting at Puri’s chest and turning away. She stays next to him, though, and he leaves his arm draped over her shoulders and Nyota can’t help but think that she should probably be touching Spock in some way, smoothing the quilt or adjusting the pillows he’s sitting against, but she can no more imagine carrying out any of those tasks any more than she can get herself to take the last step towards his bed.

She sees Spock glance at Puri and Stoyer and then away again, his gaze dropping to the bandage on his hand, which he starts picking at.

“Don’t touch that,” Puri says.

“Very well,” Spock says, stopping for only a moment before he begins to adjust it again.

“Stop. I just put that on you.”

“It is unneeded.”

“I’m the doctor, you’re the annoying patient who won’t listen to common sense. Trust me, it’s needed.”

“That is not-“

“-You go to med school, you get to mess with your bandage.”

“However-“

“-Nope,” Puri says, cutting him off before Spock can get anything else out. “I will follow you around with a hypospray for two weeks straight if you touch that again.”

“That will hardly be necessary.”

“Exactly. Because you’re not going to fuss with it.”

“Does it hurt?” Nyota asks, unable to look away from the thick bandage around his hand.

“No,” Spock answers.

“Yes,” Puri corrects. “Don’t listen to a word he says.”

“The wound is insignificant.”

“You are the worst patient I’ve ever had. What happened to medical care being logical?” Puri asks, bending over Spock and readjusting his bandage, undoing whatever it was that Spock was trying to rearrange.

“It is. However-“

“-You’re never hurt, nothing ever hurts, you’re fine, you’re good to go home, you’ll be back at work tomorrow morning?” Puri supplies for him.

“I can predict with great certainty that you are planning to disagree with me if I confirm your statement as accurate.”

Puri mutters something in Andorian that Nyota doesn’t quite catch because she’s too focused on Spock. She’s never seen him like this, so obviously nettled, even the times he’s been so annoyed with her that his exasperation has broken through that reserved and calm Vulcan exterior. Now, he seems very nearly angry and he’s pushing at Puri, trying to get the other man to move away even as he scoots up the bed a bit, moving like he’s about to stand up.

“Stop,” Puri instructs.

“I would prefer to return to my quarters.”

“No.”

“I am perfectly capable of-“

“-Sit down, Spock.”

“I am sitting,” he points out, since Puri hasn’t moved far enough away for him to stand. His voice is harsher than Nyota’s ever heard it, a tone rising through it that sounds heated and unhappy.

“Come home with us,” Stoyer offers gently, only to be on the receiving end of a glare of Puri’s. “What? Do you really think he’s going to stay here tonight and not just leave ten minutes after we do?”

“Your offer is generous, however-“

“-Hospital, Spock,” Puri says.

“Or Uhura can stay with him,” Stoyer adds and Nyota tries to get her mouth to move in time to argue, or point out that she’s not exactly qualified to be dealing with an injured half-Vulcan, or inform everyone that she is really, really not someone Spock likely wants to spend time with, not in his apartment when he’s not feeling well. She’d be in the way. It’d be too weird. She’s not a huge fan of blood, let alone burns. Also, they’re not dating.

“I-“ she gets out, but Puri has already turned back to Spock.

“Spock, you need to be somewhere that we can help you,” Puri says, his tone softer than it was. “The hospital is the best place for you.”

“I would prefer to leave.”

“Will you come home with us?” Puri asks.

“No.”

“Are you really going to leave tonight if I try to make you stay here? Don’t lie, you’re half-Vulcan-“

“-I am aware-“

“-Despite the fact that those half of your genetics don’t seem to have knocked any sense into you, beyond perhaps having me as a friend and your lovely girlfriend over there.”

Spock glances at Nyota, then away again. “I would prefer to be in my quarters.”

“With Uhura?”

Spock doesn’t answer and Nyota finds herself pinned under Puri’s sharp gaze.

“Uh-“ she says, which seems like a good substitute for explaining that they’re not actually together and going to his apartment was never, ever supposed to be something she ever considered, let alone being there with him in need of her help. But she wasn’t supposed to go to Pike’s with him for the weekend, either, or sleep in a bed with him, or find out how good he is at pool, or how picky he is about his food, or talk about him with Stoyer, and she certainly was never supposed to be in his hospital room, but there she is.

“Right, good,” Puri’s saying and he’s nodding, so Nyota finds that she’s nodding too before she can stop herself. 

“I-“ she starts again, making herself stop nodding, but nobody’s listening to her. Spock is, maybe, because he keeps glancing over at her, but Puri is speaking before she can find the words that will untangle all of this, that will return her to her own life and the rest of her Sunday afternoon with Gaila, their dorm room, and exactly zero injured research advisors.

“You-“ Puri says, his hands on his hips and both antennae pointing at Spock. “Are going to get over your thing about doctors and hospitals, got it?”

“I do not know to what you are referring.”

“If you weren’t hurt, I’d injure you.”

“You took the Hippocratic Oath.”

“Knocking sense into you isn’t doing any harm.” Puri corrects. 

“Rather-“

“-We can drive you home,” Stoyer offers, stepping forward and rubbing her hand over her husband’s back. “And we’ll go get your car tomorrow.”

“Traitor,” Puri says to his wife.

“I love you too,” she says, resting her hand on his shoulder. “Spock, you going to be ok at home?”

“Yes,” he says with more conviction that Nyota’s heard him muster since she walked into his room.

“If you make your burn worse, you’re finding another doctor to deal with,” Puri states, crossing his arms and poking both antennae towards Spock.

“No.”

“No you won’t find another doctor and just plague me until the end of my days or no you won’t make your burn worse?”

Spock doesn’t answer and Puri lets out a loud, annoyed breath.

“I don’t know what you did that you got so lucky as to have Uhura in your life,” Puri says. “You make me crazy, sometimes.”

“Luck is-“

“Illogical?” Puri asks.

“Yes.”

“Of course it is,” Puri mutters.

Stoyer leans up and kisses her husband’s cheek. “He’s just worried about you, Spock.”

“There is no cause for alarm,” Spock says evenly.

“Have fun dealing with him,” Puri says to Nyota, handing her a stack of folded clothes which she stares at, uncomprehending, then looks up at the doctor for explanation, but he catches Stoyer’s elbow and leads her from the room before Nyota can form words.

“I don’t-“ she starts, but the door’s already closed behind them.

The room is perfectly silent without them there. The sound of quiet is something she normally appreciates, but it now feels ill-fitting and uncomfortable until it’s broken by the quick breath she pulls in as she gingerly sets Spock’s clothes on the bed next to him.

“Glad you’re ok,” she says, taking one step away and then another and then turning her back towards him and going over to examine a watercolor of the Pheonix that’s hanging on the wall

“Thank you,” he says and she can hear that fatigue creep back into his voice now that he’s not arguing with Puri anymore.

“What happened with that valve?” she asks the painting. She realizes that she can see his reflection in the glass and she shifts to the side so that it’s only showing her the pieces of medical equipment next to his bed. She can hear fabric rustling and she really, really doesn’t need to know what’s going on behind her.

“The company that supplied the o-ring changed the composition of the rubber without informing Chief Engineer Olson. An ensign was attempting to fix a nearby pipe without knowing that it had worn through and had therefore compromised the integrity of the valve.”

“Did they get hurt?”

“No,” Spock answers.

“You did,” she says.

“I am fine.”

“Sure.” There’s not really anything else about the painting to look at, but the sounds of fabric moving haven’t stopped. “Did the Ambassador say anything about the dilithium?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad,” she says and then can’t think of anything else to talk about. It’s quiet again and then even more so when she hears his movements stop.

When she turns, she finds him sitting on the edge of the bed, his pants on but his shirt spread across his lap.

The bandage on his left side stretches from his ribs up over his chest, stopping just shy of his collarbone and it’s so jarring to see it when she just saw him not that long ago, similarly shirtless but healthy and uninjured. The memory makes her face flush and she glances away from where her eyes have come to rest on his tightly muscled stomach.

“You didn’t let them use a dermal regenerator?” she asks, looking at his bandage instead of the lean, long lines of his body.

“Psi receptors take longer to heal than human skin.”

“Oh.” She takes a step closer to him and nods down at this shirt. “Do you need help?”

“No.”

“Ok.” 

“Nyota,” he says and his voice is deep and low and he’s not looking at her but at his hands resting in his lap. He’s picking at his bandage again and she wants to tell him to stop but she doesn’t. “It is not your responsibility that I do not wish to spend the night here.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“Puri will assume that you are planning to stay with me in my quarters. It is not incumbent upon you to do so.”

“Do you have someone else to call?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer, just reaches for his shirt and starts to shake it out again. He gets his good arm into the sleeve but keeps hesitating when he starts to put his bandaged one through.

“Give me that,” she tells him, pulling his shirt off his arm and taking it from him. It’s that same black regulation fabric that all Starfleet undershirts are made from, soft and warm and it feels familiar to her, so many of her own clothes made from identical material. 

She gathers the left sleeve in her hand and holds it open so that he can get his hand and the bandage through it without bumping against the fabric and then helps him guide it over his head. She lets him manage his good arm on his own, stepping back as he settlings the shirt over the bandage on his chest.

“You going to just wear these clothes until you’re better and do everything with one hand?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at him.

“I do not require your assistance.”

“Why don’t you just stay here?” she asks.

“I do not wish to.”

“But isn’t it logical?” she asks, looking at all the medical equipment and then back at him like it will possibly explain why he would choose to leave this place. 

“I will call Doctor Puri if I need aid.”

“So he can yell at you again? And me, for abandoning you? No way, he’s terrifying, I don’t want to be on his bad side.”

“He is not terrifying, you are quite mistaken.”

“And you’re insane if you think I’m going to be the person who left his injured best friend alone.”

“You do not need to trouble yourself with me.”

“Then stay here,” she tells him. It seems simple and obvious and he’s always the one telling her that she’s being irrational, and now he’s sitting there injured and tired and clearly in pain, even if he won’t admit it.

“No.”

“Why?”

“As I said, I do not wish to,” he answers as if that’s possibly a sufficient answer.

“Then go home with Puri and Stoyer.”

“No. If I need assistance, I will call Puri,” he repeats.

“But you probably won’t. Why don’t you either just stay here or go home with them?”

“No.”

“Why?” she asks again.

“I do not wish to,” he says yet again.

“You are being illogical,” she says, shaking her head and gesturing towards the stack of bandages either Puri or a nurse must have left out, and then at Spock’s hand. “Are you crazy? Just stay, it makes so much sense.”

He’s having trouble getting his sock on with only one hand and every time he bends over to try he looks like he wants to wince at the way the motion pulls at the burn on his chest.

“Spock-“

“I do not like doctors.”

“Um, ok,” she says, slipping the sock out of his hand and folding it open before handing it back to him. “But sometimes you need them. Everyone does.”

“I would prefer to be at home,” he says again and she’s about to point out to him that he’s just repeating himself over and over, but his voice has dropped again and it’s so soft and he sounds so very nearly miserable that she tries to duck down at catch his eye. He’s not looking at her, though, his attention on his other sock.

She takes a step towards him and when he still doesn’t look up at her, she takes another one. 

“Spock?”

“Yes?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I have a number of coolant burns. That should be apparent,” he says, sounding more like himself again.

“No, why don’t you like doctors?” He doesn’t answer, just keeps trying to open his sock with one hand. “Did something happen?” He’s still silent and only looks up at her when she reaches out and gently tugs his sock away from him. “When you were a kid?”

“I do not appreciate your relentless inquiries into my life,” he snaps, his voice so harsh and so abrasive that she just stares at him. He looks up at her for a long moment before blinking and dropping his gaze to somewhere just past her waist. His mouth moves for a moment before he speaks, like he’s having trouble getting the words out. “I apologize.”

“It’s ok,” she says softly, sinking down next to him on the bed, close enough that her shoulder brushes his.

“I did not intend to-“

“It’s fine,” she says gently.

She waits while he picks at the bandage on his hand again, watching the way he’s staring down at it, unblinking and unfocused enough that she doesn’t think he’s even seeing it. His throat works as he swallows and then his chin comes up and he’s staring at the wall again, at some distant point that seems far away from anything in the room.

“As the first Vulcan-human hybrid, I was considered valuable to medicine and since my childhood, I have harbored an illogical resentment of the medical profession,” he says to the wall, his focus trained on it even as she stares at him.

She hears the sharp breath she draws in, her fingers stilling on his sock, which she didn’t notice she was twisting in her hands.

“Really?” she asks.

“That is what I just said,” he says, that hard tone creeping back into his voice.

“But you… what did they do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you lying?”

“No. May I have my sock?” he asks, starting to move towards it before she pulls it away, out of his reach.

“No. What are you talking about, what did they do?” 

“Nothing, as I said. May I-“

“No. What do you mean?”

“That I did not appreciate the heightened attention. It was not as nefarious as you seem to be imagining.”

Except that it is, because all she can think about is him as a young child being stared at by doctors.

“Have you told Puri this?” she asks and he shakes his head, still not looking at her.

“No.”

“You’re friends with him, though, and he’s a doctor.”

“Your powers of observation are, as ever, excellent,” he says so dryly that it all feels normal again, just for a second and only if she doesn’t think about him as a child, vulnerable and alone as people stared at him for being different.

She wants to push more, wants to hear him talk about it, but she can feel that soft moment between them start to close, like it was only big enough for those few words to slip through, leaving behind the rest of the story, details he doesn’t want to share, and memories he doesn’t want to voice, not then and not to her.

“Well, now I’m definitely not giving you your sock,” she says instead of asking him more questions.

“Truly?”

“No,” she says, handing it back to him.

He still looks so tired, his motions slightly delayed and more awkward than usual. He always seems so fluid and graceful in the way he moves, so at home in his body but now looking at him she can’t help but see a scared little boy, unwilling to admit to such an emotion but unable to completely push it away.

“If I need to call Doctor Puri tonight, I will ensure that you are in no way implicated as being culpable of abandonment,” he says once he has his sock on.

He would, probably. Not that he would lie, but she can’t imagine him throwing her under the bus to Puri. She also can’t imagine him alone in his apartment, trying to make himself dinner, deal with his bandages, and go to sleep with no one there to look after him

“I’ll stay with you,” she hears herself say.

“That is not necessary,” he says, not looking at her as he reaches for his boots. He pulls them on with some difficulty, still not glancing up at her.

“What are you going to do if you’re all alone?” she asks softly and his hand stills on the bottom of his pant leg as he adjusts it.

“I will manage.”

He will, she’s sure, but his shoulders are slumped like they never are because he always holds himself so well, and he’s messing with his bandage again in a way that makes her think that he’s going to take it off the second he’s alone. And he would be alone, all by himself and injured and he’s the biggest introvert she’s ever met and maybe that’s exactly what he wants, a couple solid hours away from everyone, but she doesn’t trust for a second that he’ll actually ask for help if he needs it.

There are so many woman who would line up around the block to be with him, so many of his coworkers he could call who would drop everything and come help him out for an evening. Two friends who just offered him a place to stay that he turned down without a thought, preferring to retreat to his privacy and his own space.

“Are you going to call your parents?”

“Perhaps.”

“Really?”

“I just answered you.”

She runs her teeth over her bottom lip as she studies him. “Are they in town yet?”

“I do not know.”

“If they were, would you ask them to come over?”

He doesn’t answer and she lets out a heavy breath.

“If I was really your girlfriend, I would tell you that you are atrocious at letting people into your life and that you should cultivate the ability to rely on others and to stop pushing everyone away because it’s not good for you. Actually, I’ll tell you that and I’m not your girlfriend.”

“I am aware.”

His voice is soft again, achingly quiet and she finds that her hand is on his shoulder without getting permission from her to reach out to him like that. He’s so thin, his bones right next to sculpted muscle, and warmth is coming off of him through his shirt, spreading through her fingers and palm.

“You do not need to help,” he tells her and she watches a muscle in his cheek jump as he stares across the room.

“Consider it a completely selfish act so that I don’t worry about you all night.”

“With enough mental discipline, you would not suffer from such anxiety.”

“Great, insult a girl’s control over her thoughts, you always know just what to say, Spock.”

He doesn’t move his head as he glances at her before looking away again. 

“I do not,” he says quietly, his dark eyes trained on the far wall.

He doesn’t, or he’d probably have a long term, steady girlfriend sitting there with him, running her fingers through his hair and kissing his cheek. Nyota does neither, but she also doesn’t remove her hand.

“Look, I’m sorry, but you’re not rid of me quite yet.” She rubs her thumb over the hard ridge of his collarbone. “Ok?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I’m not exactly giving you one, because even without your enormous Vulcan brain I think I can accurately predict the outcome of your decision.”

He looks at her, some disquiet and unease in his eyes as he searches her face, an expression she’s never seen on him before. Finally, he nods, his attention suddenly back on the wall. 

“Very well.”

It’s quiet again, that silence falling over the room and she realizes she hasn’t pulled her hand back yet. He glances down at it, then up and she feels caught in his steady gaze, whatever it was that was sitting in her throat ever since Puri called, back when she was in Stoyer’s car, descending into her stomach and creating a jumpy heat.

“Right,” she says and stands, brushing her hands over her shirt, tugging at the hem so that it’s smooth. She takes a step away from him, then another step too, for good measure, and clears her throat, the noise loud and grating. “Great. This will be great. Let’s, um, let’s get going, then.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for burns, I suppose? Not described in any detail because ick, but they’re there. The real content warning should be for the fact that I’m not a doctor and am winging it to the nth degree, especially since I found out that I cannot actually google anything about burns (or even really write about them) without seriously getting grossed out, so there’s that.

Going home with him is a terrible idea. She feels out of place the moment they walk in his door, like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands and she doesn’t know where she should put her shoes or if she should take them off and where it’s appropriate to put her bag. She’s also hungry and thirsty but she isn’t about to ask him to serve her food or water and she isn’t sure if it’s ok to just help herself to those things.

He isn’t helping. He steps out of his boots, tells her he’s going to go shower and meditate and not to disturb him, then disappears through a door that she assumes leads to his bedroom.

“Didn’t have to use the bathroom anyway, but thanks,” she mutters to his boots, leaving her own next to his, but slightly askew and not as perfectly spaced.

She stares around at his apartment, trying to make sense of what she’s doing there. It’s a beautiful space, nicely decorated despite completely bland and boring architecture and regulation furniture. She kind of expected it to be completely empty of everything except maybe a microscope, but he has art hanging on the walls, a really soft looking blanket draped over the back of the couch, and even a plant sitting near the window in the living room. She can’t identify it and doesn’t want to touch it because he’ll probably be able to spot any sign of her poking at his things. Instead, she folds her hands behind her back and turns in a slow circle, taking everything in.

There is a replicator in the kitchen and when she wanders over to it, she can’t help but glance at the list showing the most frequently ordered meals that’s automatically displayed, all of them Vulcan and most of them dishes she doesn’t recognize. There’s a row of spices on the counter that are similarly foreign, and a basket of what is either vegetables or fruits but they’re so unfamiliar she can’t even begin to guess. She wonders where he even got them and reaches out to poke at one vibrantly purple, knobby one before pulling her hand back and thinking that she probably shouldn’t be going around touching things in his house.

But it’s hard not too. He has an entire bookshelf of actual, paper books and the urge to flip through them is nearly overwhelming. She settles for reading the titles and then spends several long minutes trying to puzzle out why he would have the entire Sherlock Holmes collection in addition to a number of other Terran works of fiction. There’s a second bookshelf of padds, most of them seeming to be reference manuals for computer science, xenolinguistics, and life sciences, which makes her head swim with the number of subjects he’s apparently qualified in. There’s also an entire row of padds on artificial intelligence, graphic design, and computer programming, and stuck next to it is one on Klingon culture, and another on the history of Klingon warfare which makes her wonder, but she can’t figure out the purpose of those any more than she can the novels he apparently enjoys.

His desk is the only thing in the room that seems at all familiar as it’s set up nearly identically to the one in his office. She guesses that it’s probably something about complimentary workspaces creating efficiency, and then gets distracted by the one main difference between the two surfaces: a small, framed hologram. It’s the only actual picture in the room that isn’t a painting or hanging, and she stares at it for a long time. At first she thinks it’s just a picture of a landscape: a long, open valley rimmed by craggy rocks and outcroppings, all in reds and golds, and looking dusty and sandy. Her first thought is that it must be Vulcan, but of all the things to have on his desk, she can’t quite place why it would be there. Then she realizes the lower part of the picture is what must be a patio with a couple potted plants and draws in a quick breath, thinking it might very well be the Vulcan equivalent of the backyard of his childhood home.

She turns away from his desk before she gives into the urge to pick up the holo and inspect it more closely, only to find a beautiful, polished ka’athyra, worn with age to a fine patina on the fingerboard.

She has to actually grip her hands together so that she doesn’t reach out and pluck a string just to hear what it sounds like. She makes herself walk away from it, sitting on the edge of his couch with her hands spread on her thighs, staring around before letting out a heavy sigh.

She’s not supposed to be here, not really, not any more than she was supposed to be at the hospital or in the room when he was getting dressed, or at Pike’s house with him, or at any of the dinners they shared. She was supposed to have a couple mugs of tea with him, they were supposed to work on her paper and that was supposed to be that. Instead, she’s in his apartment, on his couch and he’s hurt and instead of leaving their relationship as something purely professional, something with clear boundaries and clearer divides between her life and his, she’s finding that the blanket on his couch is really, really soft and his couch is actually pretty comfortable, and she never, ever needed to know that.

When she wakes up some time late, she blames falling asleep on how warm he keeps his quarters, or maybe the steady drone of traffic outside his window, or perhaps the fact that she just spent a good part of the day in a hospital and that’s nothing less than stressful. Shadows are beginning to stretch across the room and her neck is slightly sore from the way she was sitting, since apparently even unconscious and asleep, she’s unsure if Spock is really a feet-on-the-couch sort of guy and she never relaxed enough to actually lay down.

He is, though, apparently a stand in his bedroom doorway looking at her type of person and she tries not to scowl at his raised eyebrow.

“You look like you’re feeling better,” she says, drawing the back of her hand across her mouth and quickly running her knuckles under her lower eyelids.

“Vulcan meditation has many restorative properties.”

“Good for you.”

“Indeed.”

She rubs the tip of her ring finger into the corner of her eye and waits for him to move from the doorway, but he doesn’t. She studies his coffee table, glancing over the neat stacks on padds on the corner and a single coaster, because of course he would be someone who uses coasters with religious like devotion and of course he only has one. 

She wonders if he even owns another one, and if so, who might have used it. Puri, probably. Maybe Stoyer too if Spock was feeling exceptionally social.

Or a string of women, though she can’t imagine that any clearer than she can him kicking back with anyone else, even Puri, and sharing an evening in. It makes her want to check the chess set sitting on top of his bookshelf for dust, but the idea that he would let something like tiny particles of lint and dirt alight on any surface for longer than a second is as equally difficult to picture as him bringing women back here.

Not that they wouldn’t be willing to come, she thinks, then makes herself look away from him when she realizes that her attention has wandered over to the way he’s standing there, clad in loose pants that look really good on those long legs of his, and a t-shirt that was probably logical because he could get it over his bandage by himself, but is only just highlighting how his biceps look with fabric stretched across them.

Which she never needed to know. Or see. Or be thinking about.

“Can I have some water?” she asks since her mouth is suddenly dry and she’s becoming aware of how hot his apartment is in a way that she hadn’t noticed as much before.

“You can.”

It takes her a second, staring at him standing there unmoving, but she finally sighs.

“Very funny. May I?” she asks, getting up and walking over to his kitchen. It takes her a couple tries to find where he keeps his glasses and of course – of course because why would it be simple and easy and not as irritating as the rest of what has happened over the entire summer – they’re on the shelf above the bowls, which are kept on the shelf above the plates, and only someone as tall as him who lives alone and only socializes with an equally height-advantaged Andorian would think that is an acceptable place to keep cups.

She is not going to kneel on the counter and she is not going to drag in a chair to stand on, so she is just going to go thirsty until tomorrow morning when she can go back to her dorm, email him the draft of her paper, and conveniently be too busy to meet up with him in person again, ever. Maybe for the rest of her career. The Enterprise is a big ship, she could probably make it work.

She can feel him behind her, that peculiar wash of warmth against her back and all she can focus on is how good he smells from his shower.

There’s a soft clink as he sets the glass in front of her, his arm grazing against her shoulder as he steps back, and when she still hasn’t moved, he asks, “Do you need instruction on how to operate the faucet?”

“M’fine, thanks,” she tells the counter, which she’s been staring at. It’s gray and clean - of course. She clears her throat and turns to look at him. “It’s a faucet, I think I can manage.”

“I would hope that with your ability to pass Starfleet entrance exams as well as successfully complete two years of the Academy that would be the case.”

“And I’m even in Ops, not like you dainty Science folks who need their ships run for them,” she says, turning on the faucet with more force than is probably necessary. He doesn’t answer and she glances over her shoulder at him only to be faced with his back, his shirt stretching along his shoulders as he reaches into his refrigerator and the fabric falling loose around his waist, bunching up in little folds right where it meets his pants.

Which she’s not looking at.

She takes a long gulp of water, refills her glass, and drinks another swallow for good measure.

“What’s that?” she asks, nodding at the container he’s holding.

“Food,” he answers, letting the fridge door fall closed.

“Really? From your refrigerator? Wow.”

“I do not understand why humans find sarcasm so humorous.”

“We don’t all have your sense of comedic timing, Spock. ‘You can?’ Really? If the Enterprise doesn’t work out, you could have a career in stand up, it wouldn’t be too hard for you.” 

“Do humans consider that a difficult skill to master?” he asks, looking down at his feet, then at hers.

“Give me that,” she instructs, placing her glass on the counter in what is hopefully a horribly obnoxious way, what with the wet ring that begins to form around the base, and tugs the container from him as he tries to open it with one hand.

“Are you hungry?” he asks, reaching into the cupboard next to his stove for a pot.

“No,” she says, setting down the container and taking the pot from him too, not looking at the way his the fabric of his pants pull and shift when he leans down to shut the cupboard door.

Then her stomach growls and she covers it with the hand not holding the pot.

“Truly?”

She ate… breakfast. She didn’t have lunch, now that she thinks of it. She had a bowl of oatmeal that morning while reading the news on Spock’s padd, a meal and a moment that feel nearly a lifetime ago.

She’s maybe a little hungry. A lot hungry. And the soup she pours out into the pot smells really, really good.

She looks at it, then at the row of spices on his counter, then at the stove, the fridge, and the bowl of produce, and then up at him.

“You cook?” she asks.

“That should be apparent.”

She turns the stove on and sets the container in the sink. “Why not just use your replicator?”

“I prefer a number of recipes other than what it provides.”

“You could program it,” she says, adjusting the heat.

“Yes,” he says, reaching past her to turn it down slightly.

“I know how to reheat soup,” she says, then lets out a sigh when she turns and finds he’s starting to rinse the container one-handed. “Stop, I can do that. And aren’t you some sort of computer programming genius? Making food takes longer and is more expensive.”

He won’t move from the sink and she smacks the back of her hand against his good arm, pushing lightly until he takes a step away.

“I prefer to cook.”

“Why?”

“You are insatiably curious.”

“Fine, I don’t care,” she says as she finishes running the container under the sonics in his sink. It’s such a relief to not have to wash everything in running water that it takes her a moment to notice that he’s plucked it off the dish rack she set it on and is trying to open the cupboard next to the refrigerator with his elbow. “Can you just ask for help? Hand it over.”

“No.”

She tries very hard not to sigh as she reaches past him to open the cupboard door for him. 

“You could also be a kitchen organizer if you get tired of Starfleet,” she tells him, admiring the neat stacks of containers in the cupboard.

“I find that I must express my appreciation that you return my advice for your career with such astute suggestions of your own.”

“Cultivating our strengths is only logical,” she says lightly, pulling a spoon out of the third drawer she tries and slowly stirring the soup. “What’s in this?”

“Plomeek broth, ka’yasa, potatoes and carrots.”

“Potatoes and carrots?” she echoes, stirring again until she spots what is, unmistakably, a perfectly cubed piece of carrot. “Really?”

“I assure you that I accurately represented the ingredients.”

“Is this a Vulcan dish?”

“Yes.”

“But you put Terran vegetables in it?”

“As we reside on Earth, it is only logical to-“

“Does your mom make this?”

If she hadn’t spent so much time with him, hadn’t come to know him so well and gotten so used to those slightly nuances in the way he speaks and acts she might have missed it, but he pauses just for a half a second, maybe less before saying, “Yes.”

“This is your mother’s recipe.”

“Yes,” he says again, slower this time.

“You don’t like replicated food because it’s not how your mom makes it.”

He turns away to pull two bowls out of the cupboard. “As I said, I prefer-“

“Oh just stop, no wonder you’re single,” she says and can’t help but grin, shaking her head at him. “Nobody makes it as good as she does, right? My brother is the same way, drives his wife up the wall.” 

“Which wall?”

“Kitchen?” she asks, finding herself smiling, just a little. “Dining room? Depends where they are.”

“Curious,” he says as he pulls two spoons from the drawer. “She must be rather acrobatic.”

“Definitely,” Nyota agrees, taking the spoons from him and scooping soup into the bowls as he watches, probably trying to see if she’s going to let a single drop fall onto the stove or counter.

“Humans have strong ties to their own upbringing,” he says after a moment and she glances up at him, not realizing that he was so close beside her.

“Tell me about it. I won’t eat anyone else’s matoke, other than my grandfather’s.”

“Tell you what about it?” he asks. “And what is matoke?”

“It’s delicious. My family’s food is the best food, hands down.”

“What are you supposed put your hands upon?”

“Sit down and eat,” she instructs, handing him a bowl of soup. “Put that mouth of yours to good use.”

She has to revise her notion that he eats next to nothing because he’s done with his bowl before she’s halfway through hers. She doesn’t blame him since it’s delicious, maybe not up to par with her grandfather’s cooking but she will admit – though she doesn’t, not to Spock – that it’s the best meal she’s had in a while and it certainly beats replicators.

“Can I ask you something?” she asks, shaking her head when he offers to refill her bowl. “No, thanks, this is enough for me.”

“I am assuming that you are referring to a subsequent question to the one you just posed?”

She ignores him, drawing her spoon through her soup and watching him carefully serve himself seconds, not intending on spending her evening cleaning food off of his floor to his exacting standards if he dumps it all over instead of just asking for help if he needs it.

“Today in the car, Stoyer said something about me and Gaila? Being roommates?”

“You are roommates.”

She waits for him to say something else, but he doesn’t.

“Um, I know.”

“Based upon the way in which you raised your tone at the end of each of those statements, I assumed you were seeking confirmation of that fact. To the best of my knowledge you are and remain roommates.”

She groans, a laugh rising out of her despite her attempt to staunch it.

“Not only do you tell jokes, you tell terrible ones,” she tells him and he doesn’t answer, just sits back down and picks up his spoon again, and she has to stop herself from looking at how nice his hand looks, those long fingers of his gripping the handle. “Um, yeah. So, Gaila. And Stoyer. She seemed to be implying that we weren’t just assigned to live together by chance. I guess I thought that was how roommate selection is done.”

“Except for species who will have an allergic reaction to living together or those who are otherwise biologically incompatible due to predatory instincts, atmospheric requirements, or other stipulations, it generally is.”

She swallows a bite of potato, looking over at him. “Generally?”

“I do not know further specifics.”

She has really, really spent too much time with him. Way, way too many hours, too many discussions, too much interaction at this point because she can hear that there’s more that he’s not saying.

“There’s something else, though, isn’t there?”

He doesn’t answer, just digs his spoon into his soup and she studies him for a long moment before she silently returns to her own dinner.

She can’t get it out of her mind, not while they finish eating and not while she cleans up the dishes, grabbing things out of his hand every time he tries to help.

“I got it,” she tells him more than once. “And you can re-sterilize everything up to your standards as soon as I’m gone and your hand is better.”

“Sanitization is not strictly necessary as our immune systems operate best when-“

“Do you need help with your bandages now or do you want to wait?” she asks, speaking over him as she stands on her toes to replace their bowls in his cupboard. It makes her wonder if he only ever uses whichever dish is on top or if he has some sort of system where he makes sure to cycle through all of them. 

She’s still scrutinizing his bowls and plates for signs of an answer when he finally finishes wiping the counter.

“Do you have a preference?” he asks, neatly folding the cloth and draping it across the edge of the sink.

She’s about to say that she doesn’t, except that with dinner over and the two of them standing in his kitchen, she realizes that she has no idea how they’re supposed to spend the evening.

Reading, maybe. She could get her book out. She could figure out if he’s ever relaxed and watched a movie in his life, and since she can predict he hasn’t, she could introduce him to that particular experience. Or she could run back to her dorm, grab her padds and take the chance to catch up on the work she missed over the weekend.

But it’s all strange to think about, those calm moments she would have no problem passing with Gaila or by herself somehow odd to do with him. She can’t imagine hanging out with him on his couch, finding out if he’d raise an eyebrow at her putting her feet on his coffee table, and she can’t picture spending a quiet evening with him, either occupied or trying to carry on a conversation.

And it is quiet. It’s just the two of them, no laughter or conversation from Pike or Stoyer or Puri or the rest of the crew, no Ambassador following them around, and none of the bustle of any of the public spaces they normally see each other in.

Because they’re not in a café or the mess hall or the library, they’re in his apartment, in his kitchen and she’s not wearing shoes, a fact that she suddenly remembers as she flexes her toes against the tile floor.

“Let’s do it now,” she says because being occupied just seems much, much preferable to any alternative.

He nods and then gestures towards the door he disappeared through earlier. She follows him, grabbing the items Puri had given her, because apparently attending to medical necessitates in the kitchen or living room isn’t all that logical.

She never needed to know what his bedroom looks like, not the deep gray of his bedspread, the fact that he keeps his science insignia on top of his dresser, or the wall hanging hung above his headboard, beautiful, swirling Vulcan script that she wants to pause long enough to decipher, but doesn’t.

His bathroom is no better. She is way too used to sharing space with Gaila because there’s something slightly off about being in a bathroom without underwear, socks, and used towels all over the floor, or toothpaste stuck to the sink. Pike’s was clean too, but this is Spock’s actual apartment. His sink, his shower, his space that she was never, ever supposed to be in.

Though on the list of things that weren’t ever supposed to happen, she also probably shouldn’t be watching him reach behind him to grab the neck of his shirt and haul it off over his head.

He looks stymied for a moment, like he can’t decide where to put it and she realizes that she’s standing between him and the door, and that furthermore, he’s unlikely to probably just drop it on the floor.

“Here,” she says, holding out her hand for it. It’s a bad plan, though, and she should have just moved out of his way so that he could walk back into his bedroom except that would have meant letting him pass so close to her they might have touched in the small space. Instead, now she’s holding his shirt and it’s really soft and really warm from his body heat and he looks really, really good in those pants

She steps out of the bathroom long enough to drop his shirt on his dresser and he can deal with that later, she decides, because if he wants to attempt to fold clothes with one good hand, that’s not on her.

Except maybe she should have spent longer messing around with figuring out how a half-Vulcan would want his shirt folded because she’s now she’s faced with him half naked and the fact that she’s about to touch him. And the way he’s tugging at the bandage on his chest with his good hand makes the muscles along his side stand out and this would really, really be easier if he either never went to the gym or had a diet that consisted of something other than fruits and vegetables, which makes him look so incredibly-

“Let me help,” she says, batting his hand away with the back of hers. She tries to peel the tape from his skin without hurting him or letting her fingers brush against him, and without thinking about being so close to his body and how warm he is. 

She gets it off of him and can’t help but suck in a breath at the shiny green burn covering his skin.

“It is not as painful as it appears,” he says and she realizes she’s just been standing there staring at it.

“Really?”

“That is what I just said.”

“Alright,” she says slowly, not exactly trusting him. She hands him the little jar of salve that Puri had given her, then takes it back again when she realizes he can’t unscrew the top. “You got this?” she asks when she places it in his open palm, careful to not let her fingers come into contact with his hand. “Or do you need more help?”

“That will not be necessary.”

“Great,” she says as she watches him set the jar on the counter next to the sink and try to scoop some out, except that each time he tries, the jar just scoots a little more towards the edge. “So you’re good, then.”

“Indeed,” he says and she watches his brows furrow as he tries to both hold the jar still and get a couple finger fulls of slave from it.

“Good, I’m going to go read my book.”

“Very well.”

“Yep, you’re totally fine.”

“I said that I was,” he tells her, trying to brace the jar against his thumb.

“Oh, just give me that,” she says, then grabs the jar and holds it still for him.

He gets the part of the burn covering the upper part of his chest done, but pauses for a long time, looking down at the worst part of it on his ribs, seemingly unable to bring himself to touch it.

“Need a hand?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You going to do it yourself?”

“I am.”

“This century?”

“I believe that humans find that joke more amusing than it is.”

“We just don’t have your comedic timing,” she tells him, then holds up the jar so that he can scrape what’s on his fingers back into it. She dips her index and middle fingers into the cream and glances down at his ribs with far more assurance than she feels. “I think that you should know that I am in no way qualified to be doing this. Puri’s kind of crazy.”

“I am aware.”

“That your buddy is insane for letting you out of the hospital or that I don’t have medical training?”

He doesn’t answer and she presses her lips together, looking between her hand and the burn on his ribs.

“Right,” she says and starts to reach for his side when she pauses again. “Also…”

“Yes?” he asks when she doesn’t finish her thought.

“I don’t know about, uh…” she clears her throat and drops her eyes from him, except that he’s standing right in front of her and it’s either look at his face or at his chest, and that’s only serving to make her mouth dry. She should have brought her glass of water in here. She should have told him that she couldn’t come to his apartment tonight. She should have never gone to Pike’s. She should have never, ever thought that entering into a fake relationship with a professor was going to be a good idea and not the entire debacle that has been, ending in a scenario where she’s standing with him in his bathroom, about to help him care for his injury.

“Nyota?” he’s asking and she blinks.

“Uh, you know, I’ve always been told that touching a Vulcan’s skin isn’t ok? Basically breaking rule number one about interacting with them. You, I mean.”

“What are the subsequent regulations?”

She can’t help but huff out a quiet laugh. “Um, don’t ask them about their ears? Don’t be illogical?”

“You are often illogical.”

“Yeah, well, it’s more fun that way,” she says, but still doesn’t reach for him. 

It’s quiet. It’s so, so quiet, just the sound of their breathing and she can’t help but look at the way his stomach moves every time he inhales, the way his skin shifts over his ribs on his good side.

She can feel him watching her and finally, after a long moment he says, “Even if I were fully healed, the most I could discern through this type of contact is your current emotional state.”

She draws in a breath, clears her throat and swears her hand is prickling with the ghost of the memories of the few times she’s touched him without the barrier of fabric between them.

“That’s the same for your hand?”

“Vulcan hands have a higher concentration of psi receptors which renders such insight much clearer and more discernable.” 

“Could I feel what you’re, um, feeling?”

“Yes. However I assure that I have sufficient mental discipline with which to forestall much if not all of such transferal on either of our parts, especially when such contact can be anticipated. I cannot, as some humans seem to fear, read your mind through this type of touch.” She’s not looking at him, her focus on the shiny, tight green skin across his ribs, so she both hears the breath he draws in as well as watches the way it makes his chest rise. “Nyota, it is considered quite rude to intrude on another’s emotional state, so even if my hand were healed I would not endeavor to do so without your permission.”

“As in when Vulcans…” She can finish the sentence, but Spock must be coming to know her as well as she does him, because he does it for her.

“The Vulcan cultural equivalent of the human kiss is done with the hands and fingers, yes. It is one way in which we establish telepathic links with each other.”

She wonders if he’s looking at her, but she doesn’t glance up to check.

“So is this weird?” She clears her throat again. “For you? For me to, uh-“ She waves at his chest, then his hand, then nods down at her own hand, the salve spread across her fingers.

“I assure you that I understand the way in which it is intended.” He pauses again before adding, “Nyota, I appreciate your concern. It is… rare.”

She might have been able to come up something to say to what he had explained about telepathy, but she doesn’t know how to respond to his final comment so she doesn’t try. Instead, she reaches for him again and presses the salve as lightly to his burn as she can.

“Ok?” she asks, glancing at him even though they’re standing so near each other and looking up at him like that puts their faces way too close together.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t react when she continues to spread the ointment over the burn, but she thinks she sees his hand twitch, just a little, when she starts on the worst of. He doesn’t speak, though, and she tries to finish quickly.

When she peels the bandage off of his hand as gently as she can, the burn is so much worse that she can’t help but just stare at it for a long moment. 

“You’re an idiot for grabbing that valve,” she tells him, trying to break the heavy silence that’s descended over the room.

“Doctor Puri has repeatedly informed me of that fact.”

She can’t decide where to start and hesitates with her hand hovering over his before deciding that the inside of his forearm looks safe enough, the burn that covers it much better than the rest.

“You can ask me embarrassing questions about human anatomy, you know, to make up for the fact nobody ever gives us a play by play of Vulcan telepathy,” she says, glancing up at him.

“I am well acquainted, but thank you for the offer.”

She’s about to respond to that, somehow, something funny and light except that then she process what he said and she feels her face flush. She quickly drops her hands from him to pick up the jar again.

She casts about for another topic, any other topic, but all she can think about is everything that Gaila has ever told her about telepathy and that just makes Spock’s comment play on repeat in her mind, over and over in that low, soft voice of his.

And he’s standing too close to her. His bathroom is not that big of a room so it’s not like there’s much space to move away from each other, but his closeness and the temperature he keeps his apartment at is making the back of her neck prickle in a that way she really, really wishes it wouldn’t.

“Turn your hand over,” she instructs, still not looking up at him and trying to stay focused on his burn, not his body so near to hers.

Gaila would have a field day with this. It could very well be her favorite part of the entire summer, when Nyota gets home and relates the peculiar awkwardness of what transpired over the weekend and the chain of events that led her and Spock into his bathroom, him dressed in a pair of pants that are really just way too attractive on him, her hands all over him, close enough that she can feel the heat of his body.

She can imagine Gaila sitting on the edge of her bed, her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide, a half a dozen remarks tumbling out of her, one after the other, each one lewder and more ridiculous than the previous.

Nyota might have had a different roommate entirely, someone who wouldn’t listen so excitedly to the entire story. Someone who hadn’t suggested this entire mess in the first place, so that Nyota would have never ended up carefully cradling Spock’s hand in hers, smoothing salve over his wrist as gently as she can. She would be somewhere, anywhere else, in her own life, and would never have come to know him like this, would have left these details about him alone, untouched, something for someone else who isn’t her.

“Spock?” she asks, looking up to find him watching her.

“Yes?”

“Earlier, you said that roommate assignments are generally randomized.”

“I did.”

She pushes ointment over the back of his hand, working it between the hard bumps of his knuckles.

“So do you think that it was just the luck of the draw that I ended up with Gaila?”

Luck is illogical and furthermore, to which draw are you referring, she can imagine him saying, but he doesn’t.

“I am unsure,” he says instead. She’s still staring at him, her hand motionless on his, waiting for him to continue. “I have observed a striking correlation in the instances of top communication cadets being placed with off worlders whose cultural norms are quite different than those of Starfleet and especially Earth.”

“So you think that it purpose then, like Stoyer was getting at.”

“I do not know the specifics.”

She busies herself covering the back of his index and middle fingers with ointment.

“Does that hurt?” she asks, since it looks like it should.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I said that it did not.” 

She thinks about saying something about his terse remark, but instead says, “You and Puri were roommates.”

“We were. I was also, I believe, envisioned as a cadet who would not be inclined to break regulation.”

“Except that you totally got a speeding ticket once. I can’t believe you made Commander with a black mark on your record like that,” she says lightly. The back of her neck is still tingling and she feels like it’s starting to spread through the rest of her, and she wishes it would stop. It’s too hot in his bathroom and concentrating on his burn is hard enough without her body reminding her just how long it’s been since she’s been near someone who’s half undressed, close enough that she can hear his breaths and see his perfectly flat stomach move with each inhale.

“That did not occur when I was a cadet.”  
“Knew it, I knew that that definitely happened,” she says, fussing with the small jar so that she doesn’t look at his stomach again.

“I did not say that it happened at another time in my life either,” he replies and she’s about to respond to that when he continues without pausing. “If anything, consider your roommate assignment to be a compliment, Nyota. It speaks to the strength of your application and the potential you had even as an incoming cadet. And, unless I am mistaken, Cadet Gaila has adapted to living on Earth quite successfully.”

“I don’t like it,” Nyota says softly, flipping his hand over so that his palm is facing her. “If it speaks to anything, it’s to the fact that they didn’t think she could do it by herself, that they thought that she’s some sort of ticking time bomb of bad behavior and that she would just willfully disregard regulations and needed what, a babysitter?” 

“You are upset,” he says and she pauses in spreading salve over his palm to look up at him.

“Damn right I am.”

“Curious. Why?”

“Because it’s such crap, Spock, that they would let her into the Academy but not trust her? Because of her species? That is so… That is the kind of thing I wanted to avoid and made me want to come to Starfleet in the first place. This is supposed to be the place you work if you want to be with people who are accepting of differences, not have everyone make gross assumptions about what people will be like before you even know them.”

“Generalizing across established cultural norms is a way in which to begin to understand those who we know nothing about.”

“You’re a fan of the practice? Calculating the odds that Gaila will do something against regs, just based on her genetics?”

“I did not say that. In fact, I am intrigued by your reaction.”

“Starfleet is supposed to celebrate diversity and individualism.”

“I am aware.”

“And you know what’s more?” she asks, rubbing salve into the base of his thumb. This topic is good, it’s safe, it has nothing to do with how his body looks or how warm her cheeks feel or the fact that she’s spending yet another night with him.

“I believe that I can anticipate that you are poised to inform me of whatever it is.”

“Gaila’s well behaved next to someone like Kirk. He’s an idiot, he’s always-“ she starts, then presses her lips together. Kirk is her least favorite person at the Academy, no matter that Spock spent a couple weeks of the summer nearly edging him out of that position, but there’s still no reason to detail exactly what he gets up to, not to a senior officer. Kirk wants to be on the Enterprise as much as she does and even though the idea of shipping out with him once they’re commissioned makes her grind her teeth, Spock can figure out for himself what an idiot the man is. “Never mind.”

“I understand that you two are… friendly.”

“What?” she asks, looking up at him before she drops her gaze from the way he’s watching her so closely to inspect his hand again, deciding that it’s sufficiently covered in ointment. She screws the lid back on the jar with more force than is probably necessary, her thoughts full of Kirk, which is a welcome distraction from the weight of Spock’s gaze, the way the hair on the back of her neck feels like it’s standing up under that heavy attention of his. “No, God no, he’s… No. And Gaila’s always bringing him back to our room and I just…”

She trails off and grimaces.

“Your roommate and Cadet Kirk are involved in a relationship?” he asks and there’s something in his voice that she can’t quite place.

She glances up at him, trying to figure out what’s behind his question, but she can’t, and then she has to look away from him again because she just shouldn’t be staring up at him like that. “No. They’re…” She flounders for a word. “Um, you know, working out the stress of the Academy together.”

“How so?”

“Physical activity?”

“Calisthenics? In a dorm room? I would think the space too small, especially with the availability of the Academy gymnasium.”

She squints at him, then purses her lips. “Oh stop, you know exactly what I mean.”

He does, she’s sure, and he has a slight uptick at the corner of his mouth and she needs for him to not be watching her like that, not standing so close to her with that light in his eyes, the thoughts of what Gaila and Kirk get up to swirling through her mind.

Spock’s injured. They’re not together, certainly not like she’s suddenly thinking about. They’re supposed to be talking about Gaila and roommate assignments and she’s not supposed to be thinking about the lean lines of his body or how blank her mind is getting the longer she stands there next to him.

“It’s hard,” she forces herself to say, her focus on his hand and only his hand, not the rest of what’s crowding into her thoughts. She nudges at his elbow, trying to get him to raise it up slightly so that it’s easier to bandage, and trying to ignore how warm and soft his skin is. “What all of you do. Growing up on Earth, being human, a lot of being in Starfleet and at the Academy is just easier for people like Kirk and me.”

“The rigors of not only Starfleet Academy but also those of the profession once one has earned their commission are well known.” 

“No.” She finishes securing the bandage before looking up at him again. She’s standing too close to him and tells herself to back up, but she doesn’t. “You know what I mean, don’t diminish that for yourself.”

He’s already tugging at the bandage and she has a half a mind to smack his hand away when he speaks again.

“I have been adjusting my entire life, coming to Starfleet was no different.”

She’s looking up at him while he says it and takes in the way he’s not quite looking back at her, his attention on his bandage instead, and how dark his eyelashes are against his skin with his eyes downcast like that.

“Don’t say things like that, Spock, I might have to start being nice to you,” she tells him as she makes herself turn away, so that instead of staring at the softness in his eyes, she’s fumbling with the bandage Puri gave them for Spock’s chest.

“That would be unfortunate,” he says as easily and as lightly as he says anything and she huffs out a quiet laugh as she tries to find the opening on the package.

She thinks maybe the moment is gone, the tension broken, but then he’s taking a step closer to her and they’re already so near to each other, his bathroom so small and the air so warm that she finds herself flushed and overheated and she feels distracted, unfocused, like everything suddenly seems very far away. 

“Nyota,” he says softly, reaching out to touch her elbow. And it’s just that, just a gentle press of his finger against the fabric of her sleeve, but she still feels the warmth, feels her breath catch. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she answers, smooth and calm even though she fumbles a little bit with the bandage she’s holding since her hands feel a little clumsy, something hot and quivering spreading through her at his touch.

He’s standing really close to her and he hasn’t moved away yet or dropped his hand from her elbow. It’s making her mind fuzzy and blank and it shouldn’t because she’s going to take the bandage and cover the burn on his chest and he’s going to put his shirt on and they’re going to spend the evening in his living room, which is a suitably large enough room that they can put multiple pieces of furniture between themselves.

Again, she tries to make herself step back because she doesn’t need to be that close to put the bandage on him, but she finds that she still hasn’t moved.

She needs to. She needs to put more distance between them and maybe take a deep breath and maybe say something light and casual, some sort of story about Gaila, or Kirk’s antics that are more or less appropriate to talk about but she can’t think of any because Spock’s hand is still on her.

“I’m glad you’re ok,” she says instead, looking up at him. She didn’t mean for her voice to be as low as it is, or as soft and quiet. She tries to get her hands to start applying the bandage to his chest but they’re not really working the way they should and apparently neither is her mouth because she continues speaking after she told herself to stop. “I didn’t… I don’t like seeing you hurt like this.”

He’s supposed to say something back, something about how if that is the case then she should consider simply ceasing to look, or that ‘ok’ is a poor word choice and that he would recommend greater specificity, but instead he just nods and that’s not right at all, not when he’s supposed to be the one to break the heavy, edgy tension that’s stretching and swelling between them. He’s still so close to her, heat coming off of his body and washing over her own and she can’t look up at him because their faces will be too close together and his eyes are too dark and soft and he’s just watching her, steady and firm as if she’s taking up his entire focus. So instead of looking up at him, she looks in front of her, at his tightly muscled chest and the long lines of his throat and the dip right above his collarbone and the way his chest is rising and falling in time with his breath, his stomach expanding and contracting slightly and she feels her fingers tighten on the package of the bandage, hears it crinkle as her fingers constrict.

She should move back. She should give him the bandage, take a step away from him, and let him finish up on his own.

She should hand him his shirt to put on because even with his injury, she wants to stare at the plane of muscle beneath his navel, the way his waistband lays flat against his stomach and hipbones.

She should go home, tell him that she’ll be back in the morning, walk out into the night air and let it rush into her lungs, except that she’s long since stopped drawing in any breath, her heart stuttering to a stop even as her pulse pounds and beats in her ears, blood rushing, coursing through her.

She should not be staring up at him, caught still and motionless in the heaviness of his gaze, time pausing and hanging around them, unmoving and frozen until he starts to bend down in the same moment that she lifts her chin and then he’s returning her kiss so carefully and thoroughly that it makes her eyes fall closed, his mouth against hers soft and pliant and gentle. 

When she raises her hand to cup his cheek, his skin is softer than she expected, warm and dry and he leans into her fingers very slightly, kissing her more firmly.

She pulls back slowly, feeling the breath he pulls in, feeling a shivering heat in her body that hasn’t been there in a long, long time.

“I think we probably shouldn’t,” she tells him because it’s not a good idea and what’s between them is already complicated and tangled and she has to look away from him as she says it because the words are catching in her throat and her stomach is churning, turning over itself, flipping this way and then that when that finger on her elbow draws slowly, carefully down her arm to circle over the back of her hand.

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t agree that this is illogical or ill advised or injudicious or whatever overly precise and exacting word he’ll pull out of that vocabulary of his, just stands there with his finger on her hand and his eyes trained on her with a concentration that makes a tickle crawl across her skin.

She should move away because he’s apparently not going to do it himself, she should put some space between their bodies, do anything to calm that quiver of heat that’s building deep in her, lodging somewhere behind her navel and mounting with each trembling, shaky breath she hears herself take.

“Very well,” he finally says and his voice is low and uneven and then she has one hand around the back of his head, her fingers fisted in the short hair there, and her balance precarious on her toes as she presses her mouth to his.

She kisses him hard and eager until his mouth is impatient as hers and then he’s pushing her back into the edge of the sink with a solid press of his body. She can hear the wet sounds their mouths are making, the inhale of his breath when he pulls back long enough to switch angles before kissing her again, the faint sound that rises from her throat, and the bandage hitting the floor when she drops it, her fingers loose and numb.

His hand twists in her hair, drawing her head back further as she sucks at his lower lip and then licks at it, their mouths coming together again and again.

“Your burn,” she gasps in a moment his tongue isn’t in her mouth.

He doesn’t answer, just drops his hand from her hair to grip under her thigh and half lift her onto the sink.

She doesn’t push the topic, both of her hands grabbing at hot skin, palming the slim, supple lines of his sides and hips, taking the opportunity to reach down and grab at his ass with one hand as she skates her fingers down the front of his pants.

She pulls at the elastic, twisting at it before hooking her thumbs into his waistband and yanking his pants down his hips. His tongue slides against hers and she hears it draw a whimper out of her throat, so that she’s squirming closer to him, her hands full of his hips and ass and the soft skin at his lower back.

He’s slid his good arm under her and picked her up before she quite knows what’s happening, so that in the space of what feel like a single breath, he’s moved her from the bathroom and deposited her on his bed. She pulls in a shaky, sharp breath and then he’s crawling over her, his mouth working at the skin of her neck as his hand pushes her skirt up her thighs. His fingers find the elastic of her panties at her inner thigh and a finger slips under the edge, and then a second one.

“Just-“ she gets out, twisting around and trying to get her hands under herself to fumble for the zipper, but it’s hard with him pressing her into the mattress, his mouth hot and insistent on hers.

Despite his lack of help and the way that instead of helping her he’s twisting his fingers in the elastic of her panties like he can’t quite comprehend such a frustrating barrier, she gets her skirt unfastened. She lifts her hips for him as he tugs it and her panties down and off, and then he’s helping her shove her shirt over her head, her bra tossed on the floor after it. 

And then it’s just hot skin, his hips caught between her knees as he hovers over her, his palm drawing a hot line from her collarbone, down between her breasts, across her stomach, and then the tease of his fingers at her so that she grimaces and tries to press closer to the touch.

“C’mon, Spock.”

“Nyota-“

“I want-“ she starts, then isn’t able to actually articulate it because he’s kissing her again, his fingers pressing her apart and then pressing into her in a way that makes heat shoot through her, makes her thighs start to shiver and her mouth fall open with a cut off breath. “Spock-“

Whatever she was going to say after his name is lost from the retreat of his hand and the way he braces himself on his forearms, his lips hot on her cheek and his breath uneven as she draws her knees up his sides. She can feel him poised against her, hot and hard and just that makes her scrabble her nails against his back.

“Nyota?” he asks instead of moving forward like she wants him to.

“Yeah, just-“ she nods, her throat dry as she breathes against the side of his mouth. She rubs her hands restlessly over his arms, gripping at the hard muscles and wanting more, trying to squirm up against him.

But he doesn’t push into her like she’s fairly aching for him to do, and when she tries to raise her hips up into his, he pulls back, his good hand grabbing her thigh to still her.

“What, what?” she asks, staring at him and trying to understand why he’s turned his attention from her to look back over his shoulder towards the door of his bedroom.

“Hush.”

“Spock?”

“The door,” he answers and the muscles of his sides that were limber and loose under her hands are now tensed, achingly so.

“What?” she asks again and then she hears it, the door chime echoing through the room like it’s coming from somewhere distant, a time and place that seems far away from the tangle of them on top of his bed.

“Computer, ID?”

“Ambassador Taele,” the polite computer answers as courteous and well mannered as ever.

“No,” Nyota groans, scrubbing her forefinger and thumb into her eyes hard enough that it hurts.

“Commander Spock,” comes the Ambassador’s voice and Spock is still so close to her that she can feel the breath he takes.

“Yes?”

“I am here to inquire after your health. I have also contacted your parents to inform them of your condition and they will be arriving momentarily,” Taele announces. “However, they state that it is impossible that you are engaged in a relationship with Cadet Uhura, as you are currently bonded to S’Thea R’Yai T’Pring of Vulcan.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone gets a high five and a hug after your reviews for Chapter 16. You all made me laugh out loud with what you wrote, thank you thank you. Here’s the next installment, hopefully equally enjoyable! Typos-free, courtesy of albino-frog. Any remaining mistakes are mine.

“You- you what, Spock? You didn’t tell them?” she half shouts, searching frantically for her panties. He grabs them out of the tangle they’re in on the floor and tosses them across the bed to her.

“That is what I just told you,” he says, way too calmly for how he’s looking around for his pants. They’re in the bathroom and she could tell him that, but he could have also mentioned how his parents, who are on their way there, think that he’s still bonded.

“You broke up with her and you just never happened to mention that?” she asks, hearing her voice rise at the end of the question.

“Yes. Would you like me to repeat myself since you clearly did not grasp that fact the first time I explained it to you?” he asks and she grabs her bra off of the floor and has half a mind to smack him with it, if they had more time and she didn’t need to be putting it on right that moment.

“You broke up years ago, I thought,” she says, tugging her hair out from where it catches under her bra strap.

“I never specified when it occurred.” His back is to her as he opens his dresser drawer, pulling out a pair of boxers and another pair of pants.

“I cannot believe you,” she mutters, hitching her skirt up to her waist.

He can’t get his pants zipped, apparently deciding it’s logical to forgo retrieving his other pair from the bathroom, and she bats his hand away, pulling up the zipper with more force than is probably necessary.

“In my defense, I hardly could have anticipated this situation.”

“Well, you better be anticipating how to get out of this mess.”

His only solution seems to be straightening the bed with inhuman speed, despite only having one working hand.

“They’re going to think you’re cheating on her with me,” Nyota snaps, trying to figure out which way her shirt goes.

He can’t get the new shirt he selects on by himself, so she tugs it over his head for him, holding the sleeve open for his injured arm with far more care than she particularly feels like right then.

“That has occurred to me.”

“Your shirt’s sticking to your burn.”

He looks down, carefully picking at the fabric over his torso to move it away, even as she reaches out and gently folds his sleeve back.

“That is quite painful,” he remarks as he attempts to keep the material from brushing against his burnt skin.

“Don’t move,” she instructs. The bandage she was holding is on the floor of his bathroom, still in its package, and she tries very hard not to think about why it’s there, why it’s not on his chest right then and why they’re not doing something appropriate, like drinking tea and talking about verb conjugations. 

It’s the self-adhesive kind, thank God, which means that she doesn’t have to fuss around with medical tape, but it does mean that her hands are under his shirt when the Ambassador gets there.

“You don’t lock your door?” she hisses, as quiet as she can when she hears his door slide open.

“It is illogical,” he whispers as she yanks her hands away from him, stepping back and staring up at him. “On Vulcan, it is customary to-“

“You’re serious. Oh my God,” she breathes, running her fingers through her hair and trying to straighten it.

And then the Ambassador is in his apartment and she’s pressing her fingers against her stomach, trying to quell the fluttery, sickening panic that starts there every time she repeats ‘momentarily’ to herself and wonder exactly what type of timeframe they have.

“Commander,” Taele says and skewers them both with a look. 

They should have shut the bedroom door sometime between jumping off the bed and pulling their clothes on. Except that they weren’t exactly thinking straight, what with his hurried and rushed and completely – completely – inadequate explanation and her sudden, shattering realization that she was naked and that his parents were on their way.

“I’m going,” she announces, except that Taele is standing between her and her shoes and of course Spock would insist that people take their shoes off and of course that means that she either has to walk around the Ambassador or push her to the side.

“No,” Taele says.

“Nyota,” Spock says.

“I’m not staying for this,” she tells him, staring around for her bag.

“Nyota, please.”

“You are angry with your boyfriend,” Taele says and damn her, she sounds calm and collected, everything that Nyota is not feeling in that moment. “Human couples are known to fight. Do not be alarmed, Cadet, in my studies of Terran relationships I have learned that after dating for as long as you and the Commander have, the period referred to as the ‘honeymoon phase’ begins to wear off. This is not a cause for concern.”

“Really,” Nyota says, pressing her fists into her hips and trying to remind herself that Taele is a foreign dignitary who has vast dilithium crystal holdings. It helps her, barely, bite back the kind of reply that she feels sitting at her throat, the way she wants to snap at the Ambassador, at Spock, and get out of that room as soon as she possibly can.

“It is true,” the Ambassador continues. “However, it is the gateway to a deeper and more meaningful relationship. You are fortunate to be progressing so smoothly.”

“Am I,” she says, tightening her fists.

“Yes. However, Commander Spock the advancement of your relationship does not mean you are not required to explain your actions.”

“I am not,” Spock says stiffly.

“I require answers,” Taele says.

“I’m leaving,” Nyota repeats.

“If you are engaged in a polyamorous relationship, that is quite advantageous as being joined to multiple beings can be very lovely,” Taele continues as if neither Nyota nor Spock had spoken. “However, it would have been wise to inform the Cadet of such. That was an oversight on your part. I do not approve.”

“I don’t approve either,” Nyota adds, “Of anything. And I’m going to go.”

“You will not,” Taele says.

“Nyota, please,” Spock says so softly that it’s nearly muffled by another chime of the door.

“No,” Nyota says, pointing towards the door. “I did not sign up for this.”

“Strife is a common occurrence in human relationships,” Taele tells her. “This is natural and healthy. Your relationship will benefit from the opportunity to discuss this.”

“I don’t care,” Nyota bites out, but when she turns away from how Spock’s watching her, that imploring look on his face and his eyes dark and shadowed, she finds that there are two more people blocking the door. All she can think about are her shoes – she can live without her bag, but she’s not going to walk home barefoot. And walk home she will, even with the Ambassador and what are now probably Spock’s parents in his apartment, even though she won’t look at them to confirm that is, in fact, them.

Instead, she stares somewhere at the wall, not really seeing it because she’s so focused on listening to the perfect, complete silence that has fallen over the room.

“Ambassador,” she finally hears in a deep, precise voice.

“Ambassador,” Taele responds. 

“Spock?” Spock’s mother’s voice is soft and warm, quiet like Spock’s is sometimes, and hesitant like his gets.

“There was a coolant leak,” Spock explains like that’s that, no further explanation needed, and when Nyota finally looks over, his father is nodding like that explanation is sufficient. He’s tall and slim, much like Spock, and there’s something wooden and stony about him, an austerity that Spock only sometimes carries, and his father has none of his son’s subtle emotions, those nuances and shifts in his expressions that it’s taken Nyota so long to recognize, let alone read.

When Spock’s father looks over at her, Nyota looks away again, dropping her gaze to somewhere just in front of her feet. She can see Spock’s mother walk closer, sees her reach out to her son, and hears Spock’s low voice as he tells her, “It is hardly an uncommon occurrence, Mother.”

Spock’s mother’s eyes narrow slightly as she studies her son. Nyota can’t help but glance over her Vulcan robes, her hair covered like most Vulcan women that Nyota has seen, but a very human, very concerned expression on her face, her brows drawn together and her mouth tight.

“I do not enjoy getting calls that you’re injured, only to be unable to reach you when we call back,” she says firmly, and Nyota can see her reach for his fingers, squeezing them before dropping his hand.

“I believe my comm remains on the Enterprise.”

His mother is just looking at him steadily and Nyota can’t help but notice that his hair is very, very slightly mussed. Just on the back of his head and she’s the only one who can see it. It makes her fingers itch with the urge to smooth it down.

“You should have called us,” his mother tells him and Spock’s eyes dart away from her.

Nyota looks away too, focusing on the wall again and willing herself to be anywhere but there.

“Commander Spock will recover, as you can see,” Taele says to his parents, speaking into the quiet that has descended upon the room again. She turns to Spock, skewering him with a look. “However, you have not sufficiently accounted for the discrepancy in your relationship status.”

“You will explain,” his father says.

“What’s going on?” his mother asks and out of the corner of her eye, Nyota sees the way his mother draws her hand down his sleeve. “Spock?”

“What is the status of your relationship with T’Pring?” his father asks, taking a step closer.

“Is there something you want to tell us?” his mother asks, her hand over his again.

He draws his hand back and grasps his other wrist behind his back. She can see his fingers flex but other than that, he remains motionless.

“Spock, answer,” his father tells him.

“Spock?” his mother repeats and when she casts a glance towards Nyota, Spock’s fingers tighten slightly before they relax again, like he’s forcing them to do so.

“We are no longer bonded,” Spock says firmly, his tone flat and level in a way that Nyota has never heard before.

“Why?” his father asks but Spock is silent again and when Nyota looks at him, his attention is fixed somewhere beyond his father, like he can pierce the far wall with his gaze, like that will fix anything. “Was this your doing?”

“What happened?” his mother asks and when she reaches for him again, he draws back so slightly that Nyota would never notice it if she hadn’t spent so much time with him.

His mother notices. Her hand drops and hangs next to her side, her fingers curling in on themselves and her thumb rubbing against her knuckles.

“When did this happen?” his father asks, taking another step towards his son. “Whose decision was this?”

“Spock, was this what you wanted?” his mother asks.

“It was a mutual decision,” Spock finally says in that same overly careful tone.

“It was illogical,” his father immediately responds. “You made a commitment to her.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” his mother asks, looking like she’s going to reach out to touch him again before lacing her fingers together in front of her.

“You cannot renege on a promise,” his father says and Spock slides his attention farther away, up further towards the ceiling and Nyota watches his chest rise and fall as he takes a deep breath.

“Spock, can we talk about this?” his mother asks, tipping her head to the side as she looks up at him, her expression gentle.

“There is nothing to talk about,” his father says and his mother turns towards him, her hands finally unclasping so that she can reach out and touch her husband’s sleeve. “Your decision was illogical.”

“Sarek, please,” she says.

“Spock, what you have done is-“

“Spock are you well?” his mother asks, cutting over her husband as her hand curls over his wrist. “Are you ok?”

“Yes,” Spock says. His eyes move towards hers, then to where her hand is on his father’s sleeve, and then away again.

“Your bonding to T’Pring was a logical decision,” his father continues and Nyota can see his wife’s hand tighten on his arm. “There is no possible explanation for your actions.”

“You are incorrect,” Taele says to Spock’s father, stepping in between the two men. “Cadet Uhura is aesthetically pleasing, a top student, and possesses above average intelligence. She has a partiality towards hard work, is well regarded by both her peers and superiors and is at the beginning of a promising career. These are estimable qualities and deserving of merit when considering one’s progeny’s eventual mate.”

Something inside of her feels shaky and sick and she feels flushed, her stomach churning and her heart hammering in a way that makes it feel like it’s jolting through her entire body.

“Cadet?” his father asks, looking her up and down as Spock’s mother turns towards her too.

“Hello,” she forces out, at a loss for what else to say under the stern silence of the combination of Spock’s mother and father both. She resists the urge to take a step backwards and tries very hard to swallow her stomach, which feels like it’s trying to launch itself into her throat. She wishes her heart would stop pounding like it is, or that her hands wouldn’t feel so clammy, or that she could somehow disappear, back into his bedroom and slide the door shut, or sneak out of his apartment all together and go back to her actual life, where nobody’s parents ever stare at her because she’s not their son’s fiancée. 

She feels a pressure on her arm and she nearly jumps, ready to crawl out of her own skin when she realizes that it’s just Spock’s hand, his fingers gently holding just above her elbow.

“This is Nyota,” he says.

“Cadet Uhura,” Taele confirms. “I am pleased that you are well, Commander Spock, or as well as you can be under the circumstances. I recommend that you check the remaining valves on your ship, that was a gross oversight on the part of your Chief Engineer. I will leave you now, good night.”

She’s gone with a sweep of her robes, the door hissing shut behind her and it’s quiet, it’s so, so quiet that Nyota can hear the sound of Spock’s fingers shift over the fabric of her sleeve as he drops his hand from her.

She’s going to go too. This has nothing to do with her, no matter how his parents are looking at her, and there’s nothing that she can do to help. She feels out of place and in the way and like the walls are closing in, the air too hot and heavy so that it’s getting hard to breathe.

But before she goes, she’s not going to leave the Vulcan Ambassador with a bad impression of her, so she rubs her fingers together, wiping them against her palm and thumb as well as she can before holding up her hand in the ta’al.

“I’m Nyota Uhura,” she confirms, waiting to see if Spock’s father will return the gesture. He doesn’t and after a moment, she lets her hand drop. “Nice to meet you both.”

Spock’s father is silent, staring at her, and Nyota can’t help but glance at Spock, then his mother.

“Hello,” his mother finally says and Nyota smiles tightly at her, trying to remember what she normally does with her hands when she talks to people. She resists the urge to fidget with her clothes or her hair, and her hands feel funny hanging at her sides like that, so she crosses her arms before remembering how off putting that is and ends up folding her forearm behind her back so that she can grip her wrist in her other hand.

Nyota feels her throat constrict further under the weight of Spock’s mother’s gaze and finally, the other woman looks at her son.

“Can we talk to you about all of this?” she asks him softly.

“Not at this juncture,” he responds stiffly.

“Tomorrow?” his mother asks.

“I have work to attend to. It would be illogical to neglect it.”

“Can we see you before you have to go into the office?” his mother urges, her eyes trained on his face.

“Perhaps.”

“Discussing this at greater length is the only logical course of action,” his father says. “We will do so now.”

Spock finally looks at him, right in the eye and something in his expression tightens. “No.”

“Tomorrow then.”

“As I said-“

“There is no need to repeat yourself,” his father interjects. “But you will speak of this with your mother and I.”

“I am not certain when I will be able to,” Spock says. “My schedule-“

“You will,” his father tells him. “It is logical.”

Spock presses his lips together before he seems to realize he’s done so because then his expression is blank again, so empty and impassive that it makes something in Nyota’s chest ache.

He nods, looking back at his father until it seems like he can’t anymore because then he’s staring at the far wall again.

“Until tomorrow morning,” his father says and then doesn’t offer anything else for as a farewell. He casts one more look at Nyota and she feels her fingers tighten on her own wrist under the weight of his gaze.

His mother looks Spock over one last time, her eyes lingering on the bandage on his hand. She makes like she might touch it, her hand quivering at her side before she looks at Nyota, then at Spock, then leaves quickly, following in her husband’s wake.

Nyota’s going too. She’s leaving because this entire thing is absurd and terrible and she is going to return to her dorm, finish her paper, send it to him and never see him again.

Except that first, she’s going to join him where he’s gone to sit on the couch, like remaining standing is just too much after all of that.

When she sinks down next to him, their shoulders nearly brush and she tells herself to move away from him, but instead bumps against him slightly, ducking forward to try to catch his eye.

He’s focused on the coffee table like it might disappear if he stops staring at it and there’s something about his expression that’s a little too blank, the way he’s holding himself a little too stiff, and the stillness in his body is a little too tight, like he’s wound up, tense and taut and very barely holding himself together.

“Well,” she says, letting her eyes trace over his profile. “Nice to meet your folks, I guess.”

“I do not believe you truly enjoyed that experience.”

She lets out a long breath, turning so that she can look at the coffee table with him, even though when she does so, her shoulder nudges against his again.

“That was maybe not what I was expecting to happen tonight,” she tells him, leaving her statement vague enough to encompass… everything. Being there in the first place, what happened in his bedroom - which she’s carefully not thinking about, and his parents and the Ambassador showing up.

“You are angry,” he says and when she looks over at him again, he’s speaking to his hands, which are folded in his lap a bit too neatly. His back is still a little too straight and there’s something about his jaw that’s too carefully relaxed, like he wants to clench it but won’t let himself, like if he can keep himself together physically, he’ll be ok.

“I’m not.” Her voice is soft, softer than she meant it to be and she wants to be angry, wants to yell and rail at him, wants to grab her things and go, but she mostly feels empty and hollow, a cavernous void filling in where her stomach normally is, like it can absorb everything he won’t let himself feel.

He’s silent for so long that she thinks she could probably stand up, find her belongings, and walk out of his apartment without him noticing, but instead she reaches out to him tentatively, like he might jerk away if she touches him. He doesn’t, so she rubs her hand over his arm, her thumb working back and forth over the fabric of his shirt as she studies him.

“Let’s take a look at that bandage and finish getting you fixed up,” she tells him, hooking a hand under his elbow and tugging at him as she stands. He doesn’t move at first, but then lets himself be led back into his bathroom, and lets her push him to stand where he was before. She kicks his pants to the side, out of the way, and doesn’t look at them. He doesn’t either, just stares at the sink, a single bead of water dripping out of the faucet over and over again, making the same dull splatter every time it falls.

“You ok?” she asks when she has his shirt off and is carefully reapplying the bandage so that it’s on correctly, not the haphazard job she did before.

“Yes,” he answers and she lets him pretend that her question was about his burn.

Later, standing at his sink brushing her teeth after he’s slipped out of the room, she studies her reflection in his mirror and tries to tell herself to sleep on the couch, or to just go back to her dorm and get up in the morning and come over again to help him with his bandages before his parents arrive.

Instead, she changes into what she’s been sleeping in all weekend and stands at the foot of his bed, staring at it.

There’s no indication of which side he normally sleeps on and she tries to decide which one might be more logical before telling herself that she’s sleeping in this bed exactly once and he can tell her to move if he wants to.

His sheets are really soft.

It shouldn’t matter, though, because they’re his sheets and it’s his bed and she doesn’t need to know things like this, like what his bedspread looks like or that he likes to cook or how it feels when he kisses her.

That list of facts about his life she never needed to know goes on, encompassing what his parents are like, and everything she’s learned about his past with his ex-bondmate, and his normal sleeping habits, and therefore how surprising it is when he doesn’t stay up late into the night like they did at Pike’s, but instead slips into bed next to her not long after she lays down.

“Nyota?” he asks into the dark, softly enough that if she were asleep, she might not hear him.

“Yes?”

“I apologize for what happened tonight.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“The fact remains that-“

“It’s fine, Spock,” she tells him, staring up at the ceiling as she speaks. “It’s not like either of us knew that any of this was going to happen.”

Including getting naked together on top of the sheets and bedspread they’re currently lying under, but she feels like it’s prudent to leave that part out.

“Very well.”

They’re quiet again for a long moment and she listens to the soft sound of his breathing, the only sound in the room besides the faint drone of the city outside his windows.

“Spock?”

“Yes, Nyota?”

“I guess that I’m… I’m sorry that I was there for all of that. I don’t think you ever meant for me to hear any of what happened.”

“It is of no consequence.”

“It is,” she corrects, rolling onto her side to face him, even though it’s too dark to really see him. She thinks he’s looking back at her, but she can’t really tell, and she thinks about reaching out to touch him, but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns back over so that she can stare up into the dim shadows.

There’s someone shouting outside, maybe calling to a friend or hailing a taxi, and the dull whine of a hover bike racing by, and he eventually takes a deep breath and lets it out again.

She can also hear something rustling, him fidgeting with something, and it takes her a minute to place the noise.

“Spock?”

“Yes?”

“Stop messing with your bandage.”

She hears what she thinks is maybe a sigh, but the rustling stops.

Then it starts again and she seriously considers kicking him. She doesn’t, because he’s hurt and she’s in his bed and he’s had a long enough day that she doesn’t need to make it worse, but it feels somehow so normal for him to be picking at his bandage, for her to be annoyed about it, that she still half wants to.

“I’m awake, I’m right here,” she tells him. “Wait until I fall asleep and you can do whatever you like.”

“It is itching.”

“You are a Starfleet Commander. You are fine,” she tells him even though he’s not fine, not even a little, but slipping back into these easy quips, the undercurrent of annoyance that isn’t even really there anymore beyond some vestigial form, feels good and normal and steadying, like it makes more sense than anything else that’s happened that day.

“My rank does not change the fact that-“

She reaches out and grabs for his good hand. It’s the one next to her, thankfully, but her hand falls too high, up on the inside of his elbow. She tugs at it anyway, trying to get him to stop.

“Do you want me to put more of that salve on it?”

“No.”

“Is there something I can do to rearrange it?”

He hesitates which she just goes ahead and takes as a yes. Her eyes have adjusted enough that she can make out the dim shape of him, so she can see when he rolls onto his side to face her.

“Will you pull that further down?” he asks, tugging at the part that’s wrapped around the top of his forearm.

“I don’t let my patients complain about my bandaging skills, but yes,” she says, adjusting it until he’s apparently satisfied. “And isn’t itching a good sign?”

When she’s done, their knees are brushing together and their bodies are inches from each other and she finds that she hasn’t moved her hand from his arm but is instead tracing her fingertips over the skin just above his bandage, letting her fingers slip to the inside of his elbow where firm muscle gives way to soft skin.

“Spock,” she whispers and she can see enough to see how he’s watching her, his face close enough that it’s nearly hard to focus on his features. “I’m sorry.”

“You said as much,” he replies and he makes like he’s going to roll away from her, but she stops him by raising her hand to his shoulder, pressing into the muscle with her palm, her fingers hooking over the hard bone until he stills. He doesn’t relax, but he stops trying to move away and for now, that’s enough.

She wants to tell him that she thinks his father is kind of a jerk – though even in her thoughts she tempers what she’d really like to call him – and that it was unfair of his parents to confront him like that, and that it’s ok that he never told either of them what happened, not if he wasn’t ready and not if that was likely the reaction he’d be facing, but she doesn’t. Instead she just smooths her hand down his arm far enough that she can slip her fingers under the edge of his sleeve, her fingertips pressed to his skin.

“I think you got dealt a shit hand in life,” she finally whispers and he looks up from where he’s turned to watch her hand moving gently under the fabric as she traces over his skin.

“I do not know what you mean,” he says and it’s better than ‘pardon’ or ‘explain’ or ‘that is illogical’, more open and less off putting.

“Did you ever have a choice to not follow Vulcan traditions? Did they ever ask you if you wanted to be bonded?”

“That is my home, that is the culture that I came from and was raised in,” he says firmly and she sweeps her thumb gently over the curve of his bicep.

“No, I know, but…” She draws her bottom lip between her teeth, letting her eyes pass over his face. She’s spent days with him now, the entire weekend, the entire summer, the semester before that and he’s familiar to her in a way that she never expected him to be.

“Nyota, my father was correct in his assertion that my decision was not the logical one,” he says and she’s never heard his voice like that, so incredibly dispassionate and blank that he seems to be entirely detached from that judgment passed upon him.

“I know, I know,” she says, then feels her forehead furrow as she thinks over his response. “Or I don’t, actually, and also you said it was a mutual choice. It just doesn’t make sense, Spock, that you were raised in this culture and told to live your life by the tenants of pure logic, because it ignores this really big part of you that is human.”

“That is immaterial,” he says, but it sounds slightly off, like it’s something that he’s repeated to himself a little too often so that some of the conviction is gone, the words slightly stripped of their meaning.

“I just don’t get it,” she admits. “Where is the logic in accounting for you being different?”

“I was raised in the Vulcan way, I am no different than my peers,” he says and she can feel his arm tense under her fingers. She rubs her hand over his arm, squeezing lightly, though it doesn’t make him relax.

“But you are. You broke up with your bondmate and you’re living on Earth with – and I don’t think I’m wrong about this – basically no contact with any other Vulcans who live here and you’re friends with one of the most cheerful men I’ve ever met and you can deny it all you want, but you have a sense of humor. A weird one. I’m not telling you it’s good.” She pauses, her lips pressed together as she watches him look away from her. “I think there are miles between how you think you should live and how you want to.”

“I do not understand why so many humans insist on continuing to use Imperial units for measurement when the metric system is far more logical and has been adopted as the Federation standard.”

“Spock…”

“Nyota, you do not understand,” he says, his tone sharp, which she ignores.

“I don’t think you’ve ever given yourself permission to set aside Vulcan norms, but you do so anyway and then get mad at yourself,” she tells him. His skin is so warm that heat spreads across her skin and she presses her hand closer against him, continually drawing her fingers over his upper arm.

“I am Vulcan,” he repeats, but he sounds less sure of that this time.

“You’re not, not completely. You can’t be,” she whispers to him. “And I think that you hate that about yourself.”

“You are being irrational,” he says and she thinks he’s going to draw away from her, but he doesn’t.

“I’m not, I’m telling you that you’re thinking about this all wrong. There are expectations for how people act – you said so today, with Gaila, that generalizations are what help us understand others, but I think that means you get something special, something that none of the rest of us do.”

“That is-”

“No, be quiet and listen. Everything you do is normal for a half-human, half-Vulcan. You have no precedent to live up to, nothing to match, no standards to uphold and logically, you shouldn’t be held to any preconceptions or assumptions. Sure, you can go through life trying to be both human and Vulcan and get both completely right, or you can decide that you just get to be you, and everybody’s issue with that is their problem, not yours.” 

She scratches her fingernails lightly over his arm, trying to get him to look at her again, but he won’t. 

“That is illogical,” he says and his tone is slightly firmer, more certain.

She lays her palm over his cheek, lets her thumb play across his cheekbone.

“I don’t think it is,” she whispers to him. “You’re pretty damn lucky, Spock. And you’re doing a good job, with something that’s certainly not easy.”

He still won’t look at her, no matter how long she watches him. She should move back. She said what she wanted to and he can think about it or not, and he can disregard it if that helps him make sense out of his life, but that way he’s studiously avoiding her gaze means that she at least knows that he heard her.

So she should roll over, pull the blankets up to her ears and ignore how close together they’re lying, tune out the heat of him so near to her, push away the memory of his body against hers, their skin pressed together, how he felt under her hands.

She should turn away, but instead she slides her hand so that it’s cupping the back of his neck and props herself up on her arm so that she can lean over and kiss him. She lets her fingers sift through his hair, lets her lips tugs at his, and decides that she’s pretty much fine without examining whether or not this is a good choice.

He’s not, though, because he pulls away with a soft smack.

“Perhaps this is ill-advised,” he says softly, still not looking at her.

“Probably,” she nods and maybe they should take a moment to celebrate the fact that they finally are in agreement about something, but she really wants to kiss him again and it’s hard to think about anything else.

She tells herself to pull her hand away from him, but instead she lets her fingers play up the curve of his ear, thumbing at the point until she sees his eyes flutter closed and his mouth part.

He doesn’t tell her to stop again and when he opens his eyes, he’s looking right at her mouth.

He lets her kiss him deeply, lets her push him onto his back and crawl over him so that she can straddle his thighs and draw her hand over the good side of his chest. She can’t help but seek out the hard heat of his body, her hand slipping under the hem of his shirt and pushing it up enough so that she can skate her nails across his stomach, draw a line right above the edge of his waistband until he draws in a short, sharp breath in between their kisses. 

It’s just the thin fabric of their clothes between them and she can already feel him straining up against her. She tries to resist rubbing against him, but doesn’t try hard enough and something less than a noise rises through his throat, is breathed into her mouth when she rolls her hips over his. It’s shorting out her brain, the way that his body feels under her and how he kisses, and the fact that his hand has come up to cup behind her elbow, gentle and careful. She tries to remember to keep her weight off his bandage and she balances on one palm as she shoves her hair to the side and cups his jaw in her other hand, tipping his chin up as she lets her tongue play into his mouth.

“Nyota,” he says, turning away after a long moment, when his chest is heaving and his mouth is wet.

“Do you want to stop?” she asks, her own breath coming hard.

“Do you?” he asks. He has his injured arm lying next to his head on his pillow, exposing the soft, pale underside of his inner arm and his hair is falling back from his face. His other hand has risen to spread on her back, his thumb brushing closer and closer to the side of her breast every time he rubs it back and forth over her shirt.

“I think this is maybe a bad idea,” she says, then works her teeth over her bottom lip. She has to look away from how rapid his breathing is and she tries to focus on something other than how she can still feel how hard he is through the thin layers of their clothes.

She lets her fingers dance over his chin, his jaw, light on his neck before she pulls her hand back and puts it on her own thigh so that she won’t keep touching him.

“What do you want?” she finally asks and she thinks that he’s going to look away from her but instead he’s staring right up at her and she can see the long line of his throat work as he swallows.

She’s already half prepared to get off of him and spend the night on her own side of the bed, carefully and diligently making sure no part of herself brushes against him, but she feels caught motionless in the way he’s watching her.

His mouth moves like he’s going to answer, but he either can’t or won’t speak and then that hand on her back drops to curve over her ass and he presses her down against him and forward so that they’re kissing again.

It’s been a long time. There’s a throbbing ache in her and the way he’s kissing her, touching her is only stoking it so that she can feel her blood pound through her.

Still, she manages to stop again, her hand braced on the pillow next to him. His fingers are dipping beneath her waistband, seeking out her skin in a way that’s making it hard to think and she can hear her own blood throbbing in her ears.

“Listen,” she says, her hand gripping into his pillow. “Once. We’re doing this once, ok? Just tonight.”

“Very well,” he says and she tries to get a look at the expression on his face, but he’s twisting under her, reaching towards his bedside table and she bats his hand away, leaning over him and pulling the drawer open.

“You’re so responsible,” she tells him, fishing around in it, unwilling to turn on a light because that might throw into stark relief him lying under her and the fact that she’s fumbling for a condom and the fact that the sound of the wrapper crinkling is one that she hasn’t heard in a long time. Not everyone uses them anymore and especially with required physicals for Starfleet, the majority of cadets – and she assumes officers – let it slip by the wayside. Spock would use them, though, because of course he would.

She pulls one from the pile in the drawer, drops it on the pillow next to his head and tugs her shirt off. She can feel him staring at her and she wonders how well he can see in the dark. She thinks about asking, but instead she sits back enough to pull at the rest of her clothes, fumbling with her panties to get them down and off with hopefully more poise than she’s feeling.

He has his good arm through his shirt and she has to help him the rest of the way out of it and he’s having trouble sitting up enough to slide his pants off, so she has to tug them down his hips until he can kick them off and they shouldn’t be doing this because he has a bandage across his chest and one on his hand and his parents were here and she and him aren’t dating and what’s between them is a knotty, jumbled mess and this isn’t going to help, but instead of sitting back and searching for her clothes among his rumpled, messy sheets she reaches for the condom.

“I can do it,” she says as she opens the package but of course he reaches down to adjust it the moment she starts unrolling it over him. “Stop,” she tells him, smacking his hand away.

And he does stop, looking up at her with an eyebrow raised and he’s slightly tenser than before, something about him that was loose and warm a little bit taut all of a sudden.

“Pardon?” he’s asking. “You would like to-“

“No, no,” she says quickly, shaking her head. It makes her hair drag across her back and just reminds her of how naked she is, that she’s sitting on his thighs and neither of them are wearing clothes and that she is still holding an empty condom wrapper, which she quickly drops onto the floor. “I didn’t mean stop, stop.”

“You are being unclear.”

“Never mind,” she says.

“I do not-“

“It’s fine,” she tells him. “Forget I said anything.”

“I have a perfect memory,” he says and she just stares at him until she sighs and looks away again.

It’s so awkward and uncomfortable and they should probably just stop and he’ll just be that guy she nearly slept with except that they got into an argument right beforehand. But she and Spock always argue and it feels better somehow, more normal and natural to be completely exasperated with him, for him to be confused and for her to just want him to stop talking.

And of course he’s overly concerned with consent and condoms because those are perfectly, predictably logical things to think about. She grips him in one hand, her other pressed into the pillow next to his head and is thankful that despite such good manners, he seems as willing to disregard the fact that this is a terrible idea as she is. Or maybe not thankful, because if one of them were more responsible, had their head on straight and were willing to think about things like repercussions and consequences, she wouldn’t be lowering herself onto him, her fingers tightening in his pillowcase and a breath leaving her open mouth.

“Good for you,” she tells him, feeling her throat work against the feeling of him in her, her breath catch and hold at the pressure and fullness.

It’s not the best position, since she’s trying to not bump his bandage and she doesn’t have a lot of leverage and she wants it to either be so good that she can’t think or so terrible that she just stops, but it’s neither or maybe it’s both or maybe it’s just been so long that she can’t care either way. 

“What are you referring to?” he’s asking and she can’t look at him like this, his eyes wide and dark and something slack around his mouth, but she can’t look away from him either, not even if she tried.

“You said that you-“ she starts but then his good hand finds her hips and he draws her farther down against him and the words die somewhere in her throat.

It’s good like that, having someone else’s body against hers, but it’s not amazing and she’s not about to ask him how it is for him, and she’s not going to sit up like she half wants to so that he can stare at her, so she finally just tugs at his shoulders, trying to move him.

“Up,” she tells him.

“Why?”

“Just sit up, Spock,” she instructs, tugging at his good shoulder until he’s sitting upright, his back braced against his headboard and she thinks she’s conveniently forgotten all the parts of doing this, the newness and awkwardness and slight self-consciousness, let alone trying to make this work with someone so stubborn.

But it’s better like that, so completely worth it to make him move because his hand is cupping the back of her head and he’s kissing her and she thinks about grabbing his headboard but instead she wraps her arms around his neck and shoulders and kisses him back, messy and heated and impatient, so that the sounds of their mouths and bodies are filling her ears.

“Ok?” she asks as she rocks against him faster, then doesn’t wait for or maybe doesn’t hear his answer because the angle is good enough that she pushes her face into her own arm and hears a low whimper rise out of her throat.

He tugs her forward to kiss again, and then his fingers slip down to the base of her neck, then over her breast, squeezing her and teasing at her nipple before he drops his hand between them, down where their bodies are joined.

She hears herself make a noise against his lips, cut off and needy and she pulls her mouth away with a wet smack, burying her face against his.

“Acceptable?” he asks, his fingers playing over her.

“Y-yes.”

“Is this the most expeditious-”

“Don’t say expeditious,” she instructs, trying to squirm closer to his touch without letting her hips falter from their rhythm. “Yeah that’s- that’s good.”

He turns as if to kiss her again but she can’t, can’t focus on his fingers on her, and him inside of her, and his mouth so she just sucks in a gasp, breathing in the same air as him.

She doesn’t want it to be over and she doesn’t want it to last and the way he’s rubbing at her isn’t leaving her much of a choice, and when his other arm wraps over her back as best as he can, pulling her down against him, she hears herself cry out.

She feels heat and pleasure build and build and then break and she thinks she hears herself make another noise, but she can’t care, can only press her forehead into his and try to breathe. When it’s too much, she bats his hand away and his fingers fall to her thigh, gripping hard and firm and she hears his breath stutter and then catch and cut off, his body tensing under hers.

“What is wrong with the word ‘expeditious’?” he finally asks and she blinks at him, realizing that she had turned away so that she wasn’t looking at him.

She has to work her tongue around her mouth and over her lips to wet them before she can find her voice.

“You just can’t say that, Spock.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she tells him and when he raises his eyebrow, she smooths it back down with her thumb.

She’s sure that there’s something else she should say but doesn’t know what it is and any words that are sitting at the back of her throat never find their way out. Instead, she sits back onto her side of the bed and looks away while he picks up the condom wrapper from the floor and walks into the bathroom. She needs a drink of water but she’s not entirely sure that she can find her clothes without turning on a light and somehow going into the bathroom or walking into the kitchen feels impossible to accomplish, like it’s just easier to turn on her side and draw the covers up over her shoulders, even though she’s still sweaty and overheated and there’s still a deep pulse echoing through her body.

He gets back in bed without a word and she feels gentle tugs on the sheets as he straightens them. They kicked them into a tangle and it takes a long moment until he can pull them up over himself. She thinks about offering to help, but she doesn’t.

And then it’s quiet. She can feel the heat of his body even though there are several careful inches between them. She wonders if he got dressed again but she doesn’t turn over to check since she’s too busy staring at where the wall would be if there was enough light in the room to see it.

“Night,” she finally says into the gray and black of his bedroom.

“Goodnight, Nyota,” he responds, his voice low and rough and she never needed to know what he sounds like after he’s had sex, but she does.

She should let herself drift off, satiated and relaxed. She should say something else. She should fall asleep and deal with everything that happened when the sun is up and she’s had a night’s rest. She should ask him if he’s ok. She should keep quiet and leave it up to him if he wants to talk about what just happened. She should tell him that she’s fine, she’s great, it was good, that she had fun, that it felt amazing and that she’s glad he’s the kind of guy who reaches for a condom without her having to ask. She should close her eyes and try to ignore the way her memory is replaying the soft catches in his breathing, the way he touched her and how his hips moved. She should make some sort of joke, something light and funny and he can misunderstand it and she can explain and the tension in the room will pop like a soap bubble, dissipate like it was never there and it’ll be as comfortable as it ever is between them, a shared acceptance of this situation they’ve gotten themselves into. Instead of doing any or all of that, she keeps staring into the dark, counting her breaths and his, wondering about what they’ve done and where they can possibly go from here.


	18. Chapter 18

“Um,” she says, which seems like a pretty good way to sum up the fact that she’s waking up naked in his bed.

“Good morning.” He’s paused in his bathroom doorway and she lets her eyes slide away from him as she twists her hair around her hand, trying to smooth it as much as she can if he’s going to be looking at her like that.

“What time is it?” she asks as she fumbles for the sheet, drawing it up over herself as she looks away from him. She doesn’t really want to be talking to him since it would be so much easier to just avoid everything that happened last night. And maybe over the weekend. And the week before that. And, if that works well, then the entire summer too. Maybe they can dial everything back to the moment before she ever went to his office to ask him to serve as her research advisor and events would have never tumbled out of control so that she’s there, lying in his rumpled bed.

She glances at him and then back at the tousle of blankets on the bed. He looks absolutely gorgeous. Ridiculously gorgeous. Gorgeous in a way that should probably be illegal and she might have to write to some Federation council member or another about officers they let walk around in those goddamn loose pants and nicely fitting t-shirts and bare feet. Then she can’t help but look up at him again, taking in his slightly mussed hair and the fact that he needs to shave and she stares down at the sheet once more, smoothing wrinkles out of the fabric.

“0617,” he answers and that’s good, cool and concrete. Talking about the time is something that they can both handle, something that helps to push away everything about last night or the fact that she’s still there.

She nods and rubs her palm over her face, scrubbing her forefinger and thumb into her eyes as she tugs the sheet up a bit higher.

“I did not intend to wake you,” he says and she wants to tell him to stop talking because appropriate topics pretty much only include the time and maybe something about the weather. She would turn to look out the window and see if the sun is out, but she doesn’t trust herself to not look at him again.

“S’fine,” she mumbles instead, drawing her knees up under the sheet and dropping her forehead onto them as she yawns, because it’s just too early to explain to him what to talk about with a colleague the morning after sleeping together.

She doesn’t know what woke her up, not really, since he’s always so quiet, but maybe it’s just the resounding feeling of displacement of being in someone else’s bed with no clothes on or the thought that it’s Monday morning and waking up in someone else’s apartment isn’t exactly a habit for her on a workday.

Or any other day, as her body’s reminding her with the heavy, sweet lassitude that she can feel weighing her down, that sensation of having had sex not that long ago. Good sex. Sex that was awkward and kind of strange and definitely a bad idea, but good. Better than anyone else in recent memory. Sex that made her a little sore in places that haven’t exactly gotten that much use lately.

Spock either takes a hint when she doesn’t get out of bed or finds it logical to walk back into his living room, leaving her blessedly alone. It gives her a chance to find her bag and figure out which clothes she hasn’t worn yet, and then grab what she was wearing the night before, now neatly placed on top of his dresser, and shove it into her bag like she can cover up the evidence of what just happened. She tries to straighten his bed too, even though it’s kind of a mess, and similarly attempts to sort out what’s happening with her hair.

“Would you like anything?” he asks when she pads into his kitchen, hiding another yawn in the back of her hand.

“Coffee,” she states, since she’s not ready to deal with the fact that she just woke up naked in his bed without a serious amount of caffeine.

And maybe he just asked her that as an opening for her to decline, to grab her stuff and go and maybe she should, but it’s too late now.

He hands her the mug from the replicator and she takes it without touching him, curling her fingers around it.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks and she glances up from the mug before looking back down at it again. She wishes he wouldn’t ask her that, wishes that he would return to the standoff-ish officer she met at the beginning of the summer, the complete ass who would have just stood there silently and probably corrected something about what she said, or how she is holding the mug, or tell her that coffee is illogical.

“Yeah, fine, thanks,” she says, taking a sip. “Do you need help with your hand this morning?”

“No.”

“Great,” she says, raising her mug again and wondering how quickly she can finish it and get out of there.

Except that he’s standing at the sink trying to wash his bowl from whatever he had for breakfast and it keeps rolling onto its side every time he tries. She watches him for a moment try to sort out how he’s going to accomplish that with one hand, then pushes him out of the way with her shoulder.

“I do not require assistance.”

“I didn’t say that you did.” She sets down her coffee and takes the bowl from him, focusing on washing it so that she doesn’t have to think about him standing there beside her. “Are your parents coming over soon?”

“I have not yet spoken to them.”

“Of course you haven’t,” she says, setting the bowl on the drying rack, then picking it up again and putting it in the cupboard. She slides both hands around her mug, the heat seeping into her skin and stares down into the liquid. “I’m going to go, I need to work on my paper.”

“Of course.”

But when she goes back into her bedroom to grab her bag, she can’t help but glance towards his bathroom again, and then at him when she realizes he’s followed her into the room.

“Nyota-“ he starts.

“-If you’re going to want help with your bandages – and I know, I know that you’re not actually going to ask for it, but if you do you should tell me now because I have other things to get to today,” she says, speaking over him and cutting him off, something tightening in her, hot and jumpy at the thought that he might actually want to talk.

He’s just staring at her, his eyes dark and intense before he blinks and looks away.

“I do not need your assistance,” he says and his tone is cooler than it was, creeping back towards the note it used to carry, back in the beginning of the summer when all of this made more sense between them. It should probably make her feel better, to put more distance between them like that, to fall back into how they used to be, but it just ends up making her slightly nettled, a bit exasperated with him.

“Right, great, good to hear,” she says, then drops her bag onto his bed and walks into his bathroom.

She has the salve out and is pulling out another bandage when he finally joins her.

“I-“ he starts again and she turns slightly so that she doesn’t have to look at him, fussing with the jar of cream instead.

“Take off your shirt,” she tells him, not that that’s something she should be saying to him because he’s her advisor and she needs to remember that fact and not how his body feels under her hands.

“That burn is much improved,” he says and when she turns around to look at him again, she realizes that there is no bulky bandage under his shirt.

“You’re sure?” she asks, scrutinizing how the fabric clings to his chest and falls over his stomach.

“I said as much.”

“Good,” she says, thinking about asking to see it. It would mean either him taking off his shirt or at the very least lifting it up and she realizes after a long moment that she’s staring at his chest. She takes a step back and clears her throat abruptly. “What about your hand?”

He doesn’t answer so she drops the jar back on the counter and starts unwrapping his bandage, stripping off gauze and medical tape as she uncovers first his forearm and then his hand.

“That looks better.”

“I informed you that I do not need your help.”

“Are you going to leave a bandage off of it?” she asks, turning his hand this way and that so that she’s not tempted to look up at him. Their faces would be too close together and all she can think about is how he kisses, careful and thorough. It makes something in her stomach warm, which she ignores as best she can, irritated with herself that she’s even thinking about it.

“It is not needed.”

“Is Puri going to find you at some point today?” she asks, her focus still on his hand.

He hesitates before answering. “It is probable.”

It doesn’t take her long to cover the burn with salve, mostly because she’s trying to do it as quickly as possible so that she can get out of there. It feels like her neck is tingling and her stomach keeps jumping and once, as she rubs cream over the inside of his forearm, her elbow brushes against his stomach and she really doesn’t need to be thinking of how nice his abs are.

“I’ll see you later,” she tells him after she finishes winding the bandage around his arm and hand. She screws the lid back on the jar so that he doesn’t have to and then turns towards the sink to rinse her hand off, thinking that it’s better to not set a time or place. She’ll just see him around, or send him a draft of her paper, or something, anything so that she doesn’t end up in his apartment again. They can meet somewhere public if they need to, some time after his parents are firmly off-planet.

“Very well,” he says and he seems to be intent on ignoring her as she is him, because he just reaches past her to retrieve a can of something.

And a razor and that’s probably a hint to her that she should leave, but he can’t get the top of the can off with one hand.

She takes it from him and glances down at the can, seeing that it’s shaving cream. She pops the cap off, puts it on the counter and sets the can right next to it before picking it up again when she realizes that there’s no way he can spray it into his hand by himself.

“How much?” she asks when he looks up from wetting his face to see her holding it again. “I have to go, how much do you want?”

“Two point five cubic inches.”

“What? I don’t know what that means.”

“I was under the impression you preferred Imperial measurement units.”

She lets out an annoyed huff and fills his palm with shaving cream when he holds his hand out. “Funny, Spock.”

“It was not-“

“-Intended to be,” she finishes for him. “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

She tosses out the package the bandage was in, studiously ignoring the fact that there’s a condom wrapper mixed in with a couple tissues in his wastebasket and the fact that she’s still in his bathroom with him and he’s shaving and she spent months seeing him in his uniform during class, in civilian clothes over the summer, and now she’s seeing him the morning after having him naked underneath her.

She’s going to go, it’s not right that she’s there, but she also can’t help but look up at him as he begins to drag the razor down his cheek.

“Can you really do that by yourself?” she asks him.

“Yes.”

“Really?” she asks, watching him tip his chin up slightly. She’s leaving, but she’s also not going to face Puri if Spock manages to cut himself.

“Do you need me to repeat myself?”

“I might,” she says.

The tile of his bathroom floor is faintly cool under her bare feet, a stark difference to the warmth of the air, and it’s prompting her to go put socks on, pick up her bag, find her shoes, and leave. She hasn’t been back to her dorm since Friday and she doesn’t need to spend any longer in his apartment than she has already.

He switches his razor to his other hand in a practiced, easy gesture that makes her think that he does that every morning, uses both hands like that, except that he can’t actually hold it in his bandaged fingers.

He still tries, raising the razor towards his face before pausing, switching it back into his right hand and trying again, but that the motion is very nearly clumsy, or as clumsy as he ever gets. It’s so odd to see him without his normal grace, that poise that he carries himself with. It was odd to see him without clothes on, too, but she’s not thinking about that.

She doesn’t touch his skin when she takes the razor from him and ignores how even despite that, she can still feel the heat of his hand.

She needs to be going, but she rinses it under the faucet instead before turning back to him, her fingers tightening over the handle.

“Have you done this before?” he asks and she thinks he really shouldn’t sound so concerned and have that eyebrow of his raised when she has a razor in her hand.

“Are you asking that because you really want to know, or because you don’t want me holding a sharp blade against your face and throat?”

“Vulcan jugulars are further recessed than those of humans.”

“Lucky,” she tells him. “And I’ll be nice, I promise.”

Her father would sometimes give her shaving cream to play with while he shaved, which she figures makes her somehow qualified to accomplish this. Probably. Maybe.

She boosts herself to sit on the counter next to the sink, ignoring the way he immediately looks down at the surface like she’s affected its cleanliness in perpetuity. She’s never coming back to his apartment, so he can scrub his entire bathroom after having her there for all she cares.

“Come closer,” she instructs because he’s so tall and even sitting like she is, if he’s going to stand so far away, she’s not going to be able to reach.

Not that she exactly wants him back between her legs, but it’s either that or send him off to work with a half-shaved face, so she lets him step between her knees as she raises the razor.

He’s still eyeing it and she needs to be going back to her dorm right then but instead, she scrapes the razor over his cheek, drawing a clean line in the shaving cream next to the one he already made. The sound is familiar from watching her father, sharing a bathroom with her brother when she and her sister would fight with him over who got to use the mirror before school, and other men she’s spent mornings with, but she never even thought about the fact that Vulcans would need to shave, let alone see Spock doing so, and especially not in any capacity where she would be present for it.

He tugs the skin of his neck taut with his good hand when she gets to that part and she studies the underside of his jaw, thinking about the mornings at Pike’s when she slept later than him. If she hadn’t woken up when she did this morning, would he be trying to shave by himself in preparation for meeting up with his parents? Probably, she figures. Or maybe use the entire thing as an excuse to not see them and just work from home all day, avoiding them and everyone else.

She wonders if he’ll just be as stonily silent as he can get sometimes, or if he’ll actually explain to his parents what happened with his bondmate. He’ll probably say nothing if he gets his way, but he also seemed fairly incapable of refusing his mother’s questions, no matter how adeptly he avoided everything his father had said.

She would too if her father was like that, demanding answers as to why she hadn’t lived up to his expectations. Her dad isn’t, though. He’s quiet and kind and spends most of his time trying to make her mom and her and her siblings laugh.

“You going to be ok?” she asks, trying to navigate the skin over his jaw without nicking him.

“I believe I aptly conveyed the fact that my skin is healing.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she tells him.

“I am aware.”

“Of course you are,” she mutters, leaning over to the sink to rinse out his razor again. 

She braces her hand on his shoulder, which is a terrible idea because he’s so warm and his body is so fit that she’s having trouble concentrating, so she ignores it as best she can, his firm muscles that she can feel through his thin shirt and how close he is to her, and the way his eyes look the few times they make eye contact accidentally.

Instead, she studies the line of his jaw and how his skin looks right underneath it, and how his neck stretches when he tips his chin up for her again.

“Spock,” she says quietly while he’s not looking at her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I do not,” he says firmly. His throat looks really nice when he speaks. His mouth does too, but she’s not thinking about that.

“Are you sure?”

“I said that I was,” he says in a tone that is so resolute and determined that she squeezes his shoulder.

“Ok,” she says and falls silent. 

The quiet hangs between them, the occasional rush of water as she rinses his razor, the soft sounds of their breathing and once her telling him to drop his chin again. She can feel him watching her, that attention on her in that way of his that makes her skin prickle. She won’t let herself look back up at him, not with his face so close to hers, not with her hand on his shoulder like that, not alone in his bathroom after spending the night together.

She’s nearly done when his lips finally part and she glances at them, and then away again.

“Following Vulcan tradition, T’Pring and I were bonded when we were seven,” he says and she’s so surprised that she lifts the razor away from his cheek.

He slips it out of her hand and finishes the very last on his own, his gaze fixed on his reflection. He can probably still see her staring at him, but she doesn’t stop. He hasn’t moved away from her either and is just leaning over her leg so that he can see into the mirror and she feels caught like that, frozen between wanting to move and wanting to hear what he’ll say next.

“Doesn’t leave much tolerance for an age difference,” she finally says.

He sets the razor down with a click and turns up the hot water until steam is curling up from the sink.

“Humans embrace a greater age discrepancy in relationships than Vulcans do, that is true.”

She should go. She doesn’t need him to say anything else and she should leave him to his morning and his parents and his past, all of which are separate from her life and aren’t anything that she ever needed to learn about. Except that he still hasn’t moved, is just holding his hand under the stream of water to test the temperature.

She realizes that her hand is still on his shoulder and she yanks it back, folds it with her other one in her lap.

“I did not consult with her when I decided to attend the Academy in lieu of remaining on Vulcan to study at the Vulcan Science Academy,” he says, then bends down to rinse his face off, carefully wiping away remnants of shaving cream.

“They have a great linguistics program,” she says as she watches the way his hands look against the skin of his face. It’s easier to talk about the VSA than it is to ask anything about his ex, and it’s easier to think about their xenolinguistic department than it is to dwell on the fact that he’s telling her any of this.

“Indeed.”

She’s sitting next to the hand towel and she pulls it out from beside her to give to him.

“What, uh, happened?” she asks even though she shouldn’t. She should go, let him finish getting ready for work on his own, slip out of his apartment and go find Gaila and let her roommate’s enthusiasm and constant jocularity carry her through the day.

“When I graduated, I debated returning to Vulcan to work at the Starfleet outpost there.”

“You didn’t, though.”

“Obviously,” he says so dryly that Nyota thinks he’s learned a thing or two about sarcasm over the summer. 

He falls silent again and maybe that’s it, all he’s going to say about the matter, and that’s good, exactly how it should be because what happened with his bondmate is between him and her and has nothing to do with Nyota. She has plenty of exes, none of whom she would consider discussing with Spock.

Then again, she wasn’t engaged to any of them, and her parents certainly didn’t pick them out for her, and she’s always tended to end breakups with long phone calls to her mom and dad, not aching, steely silence. 

He draws in a breath before speaking again and she watches the way his mouth moves before he finally gets the words out. “When I was offered the position to serve as first officer and chief scientist on the Enterprise, it became clear that the advancement of my career would be limited by my commitment to her.”

“Starfleet sometimes lets officer’s spouses on board, even if they’re civilians,” she points out, even though he knows that, but talking about policies is easier than imagining him caught between his obligation to his ex and his responsibility to his career. She’s met very few people who are as dedicated to their work as Spock is, and even among the enthusiasm Starfleet officers have for their profession, he seems to have a single minded dedication that is rare. She can’t help but imagine that if he were still a student, he’d be one of the few that spends as much time in the library as she does.

“And yet there is a necessity in such an arrangement that both partners would wish for that,” he says.

“So you chose Starfleet over her,” Nyota says quietly, watching him pat his face dry. He hands the towel back to her and she hangs it up as neatly as she can, even though she’s sure it’s not up to his standards.

“I chose a great many things over her, as did she over me,” he says and she wonders if he’s just hiding any lingering unhappiness under his Vulcan control, or if it really was mutual, really was the best decision for both of them.

She wonders why he’s telling her this. Practice for his parents, maybe, or just a chance to say it out loud before his father interrupts his every other word with how illogical the entire thing is.

She bets he would get a kick out of a fictitious relationship, but then again she doesn’t exactly want to be responsible for the Vulcan Ambassador having a heart attack at the very thought.

“You never told your parents,” she says softly when Spock finally takes a step away from her. She presses her legs together, then crosses them, even though it makes her foot bump against his hip.

“That is correct.”

He’s pulled a bottle of something out of a drawer under his sink. It smells great when he flicks the cap open, but so did his shaving cream and so does whatever soap he uses when he showers, which isn’t something she’s thinking about except that she is.

“Here,” she says, taking it from him and squeezing some onto his fingers. She watches him spread it around with his thumb and can’t help but think that he has really nice hands. She tucks her own hands under her thighs, her palms pressed against his countertop, looking at him.

She sometimes doesn’t know how to talk to him without there being a good chance that he either won’t answer or will change the subject, so it takes her a moment to find the right words. “Has your life been better without her?”

“Yes,” he says, smoothing the cream over his cheeks, his focus still on the mirror. “It was… freeing.”

“I can imagine,” she murmurs, watching him. “Do you-“ She hesitates, pushing her tongue into her lower lip before continuing. “Do you ever miss her?”

“No.”

“Never?” Nyota asks before she can make herself stop. “That’s kind of a long relationship.”

“It was.”

She chews at her lower lip, telling herself to stop lingering on the subject, to stand up and leave him be, to get out of his bathroom and his life, except that she doesn’t find herself moving. Instead, she sits there studying him, thinking about everything he’s told her.

“We were quite close as children,” he finally says.

“Really?” she asks and she knows he can hear the surprise in her voice. It’s hard to imagine him as a kid, let alone playing with a friend or whatever Vulcan children do. Calculus problems, in all likelihood.

“As we grew, we had substantially less in common and had nearly ceased communication by the time I earned my commission. However, that does not mean that there was not a discernible period of adjustment at the end of our relationship,” he says. He carefully rinses off his fingers and she watches the way the water plays over his hand.

“Double negatives are illogical,” she tells him because that seems a more straightforward reply than responding to anything he just said. 

He doesn’t say anything and she eventually looks away from him, passing the towel back to him so that he can dry his hand. He wipes down the counter, too, and she scoots slightly to the side so that she’s out of his way.

He’s silent as he puts everything away and she feels the moment slipping out from in between them, these times of quiet that they sometimes share few and far between, and so before he’s done and before she stands up, she finds herself rushing to ask, “How long ago did all this happen?”

“It was not recent.”

“That’s not a very specific answer.”

“I am aware.”

It’s not a specific answer but it’s so much more than she ever expected to learn about his past that she’s busy mulling over the idea of him with a partner, one he grew up with under the expectation that they would be married, live together, have children together, and shape their lives to include one another. To have that all fall apart is… a lot.

“I’m sorry,” she finally says.

“There is nothing for you to apologize for.”

“Still,” she says and he catches her eye for a moment before looking away.

His focus is on snapping the cap back on the can of shaving cream as he says, “It took us some time to come to a final decision and then longer to dissolve the actual bond between us, as we had to meet in person to accomplish such. It was difficult to find a time that we were both available.”

She drums her heel against the cabinet below her and she sees him glance towards the sound before he resumes rinsing out his razor.

“So when was that?” she asks. Years ago, maybe, or for all she knows, it happened last week. Either way, it’s none of her business and she shouldn’t be bothering him about it, except that she is. And she’s turning over everything she knows about him in her mind and all those months of being his student, and now the summer they’ve spent together. 

“You switched our final exam to a take home paper,” she says slowly, letting her foot fall still so that silence descends on the bathroom.

He looks at her before turning away again, placing everything on the shelf with precise movements. 

“I did.”

“And days later I went to your office to ask you to be my advisor.”

“You did.”

She looks at him for a long time, but he won’t look back at her. She doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she finally just hops down off his counter without saying anything and he’s also quiet, though she can feel him watching her as she gathers up her things.

“I, uh, I’ll let you know if I have any questions as I work on my paper,” she finally tells him when she has everything and is standing by his door, wondering exactly what to say to him. “Good luck with your parents.”

“Luck is illogical.”

“I know,” she says and gives him a small smile. “But so is sounding like a broken record.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. See you later.”

She finishes pulling on her boots and when she stands up and slings her bag over her shoulder, he’s still standing there.

“Listen,” she starts, because maybe he’s done with this conversation, but he hasn’t walked away yet and she doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. Sometime later in the week, maybe, if at all before classes start. “I don’t think that what you did was illogical.”

“Your grasp of logic is substandard, at best.”

She lets out a loud sigh, her shoulders rising and falling on the breath and just stares at him until he drops his gaze from hers.

“I apologize,” he says. “That was perhaps not an appropriate response.”

“Perhaps,” she echoes lightly, the urge to snap back at him there, but buried under seeing him with a bandage still on his hand and the way his father spoke to him and everything he just told her about his ex.

She turns to go when she feels him brush his fingers over her shoulder, so lightly that she could probably ignore it if she wanted to.

She doesn’t, just looks back at him.

“I-,” he starts, then stops himself. He pauses for a moment before taking a step towards her and there’s something in his expression that makes her think about moving towards him too. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she answers. She opens her mouth to say something else – what, she doesn’t know, and no words come out, so she turns and leaves with one last quick look back at him.

…

“Eat your sex bagel.”

“This is weird.”

“Well, it’s not officially time to start drinking yet or I’d buy you a drink. Instead, you get a bagel as congratulations for finally getting laid. I’m so proud of you. And you’re probably starving since I’m imagining he’s pretty good in the sack, so you should eat up.”

“I don’t know how I got stuck with you in my life,” Nyota sighs before she takes a bite. She is starving and he was pretty good in bed and the bagel tastes just as good as it looks and she does know how she got stuck with Gaila, the thought of which makes her a little sad as she looks across the table at her roommate, her green skin and bright red hair sticking out among the other patrons of the small café Gaila took them to. She’s thought all morning about telling her what she learned about their rooming assignment, but she can’t really figure out the best words with which to bring it up.

“So,” Gaila grins, propping her chin on her hands and smiling. “How many times did you do it?”

“C’mon, Gaila, I’m not telling you all that stuff.”

“Why not? You haven’t gotten any since that short guy.”

“He wasn’t that short. And we didn’t…” Nyota starts, then trails off, waving in some vague manner that is meant to convey everything that did and didn’t happen between her and that guy. At least it was a real date. Maybe he isn’t as tall as Spock, but it wasn’t so messy and mixed up as what they’re doing. If it was anything, it was just a little boring.

“Is it big?”

“Gaila!”

“Like sort of big or like really big? Or really, really big? And it’s green, isn’t it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Nyota says firmly.

“C’mon.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“This is not up for discussion.”

“But it’s fun.”

“It’s private.”

“But you’ve told me everything else about him,” Gaila points out.

“Not this,” Nyota says firmly, busying herself with her bagel.

“Of all the utterly incomprehensible humans I have met, you are by far the most the most difficult to understand, Nyota Upenda Uhura.”

“Thank you,” she says primly.

Gaila sighs a long, hard breath out of her nose. “That was not a compliment.”

Gaila lets her eat half of her bagel in peace before pursing her lips and looking up from her own breakfast to focus on Nyota again.

“So is this a thing now?”

“Is what a thing?”

“You two doing it all the time?”

“What? No, no, of course it’s not a thing, it’s not like that at all,” Nyota answers quickly.

“But you liked it.”

“Sure, it was fine, it wasn’t bad.” She pauses and takes another bite. “Kind of awkward.”

“Bad awkward?”

“Sleeping with your half-Vulcan research advisor awkward,” Nyota clarifies.

“You have finally succeeded in having a sexual experience that I haven’t. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Nyota says, grinning. “Never thought it would happen. Can I get an award or something?”

“Eat your bagel,” Gaila instructs. “And I won’t make you admit that you like him.”

“I don’t like him,” Nyota says automatically.

“Sure you don’t.”

“Gaila, it’s not like that,” she sighs, dropping her bagel on her plate and looking over at her roommate. “He and I aren’t dating, we’re just in this weird place we’ve somehow gotten ourselves into. I don’t even think that we’re friends.”

“Not really being friends is at least a step up from considering homicide,” Gaila points out.

“It’s just…” Nyota starts, then lets out a long breath as she pokes at her bagel, trying to figure out how to explain everything to Gaila. It’s complicated and messy and sometimes it gets so muddled in her own mind that it’s hard to put it into words. “So he…” She shakes her head and takes another bite of her bagel. “He’s nice, you know?”

“No, I don’t because you’ve spent all summer telling me what a horrible person he is.”

“He’s just really… Complicated? He has all this stuff going on in his life and I just…” She puts her bagel back down and shakes her head. “I kind of don’t want to go there. He’s got baggage. Serious baggage.”

“Well, you have suitcases of padds. Serious suitcases.”

“No,” Nyota sighs, turning the remainder of her bagel this way and then that on her plate. “I mean that I’m glad this is all going to be over soon. I never wanted to know all this and he’s… He’s a lot, for anyone. Puri is so patient to be his friend and I just…”

“What about not as a friend?” Gaila prompts.

“Exactly, not as a friend it would be simpler, to just step back from all of this.”

“No, I meant-“

“I’m his student, not his… whatever. Fake girlfriend who got embroiled in this whole thing he has about his parents and his identity and his ex and that’s not for me, you know? To deal with?”

“Well, you are dealing with it.”

“I know, but I don’t want to be.”

“And you got some banging banging out of it.”

“Nice use of a gerund as an adjective and a noun,” Nyota says, holding up her hand for a high five, which just makes Gaila frown and shake her head, her hands staying firmly in her lap.

“No. No word stuff, not before cocktails.”

“It’s like 0900.”

“Exactly, we have at least thirty minutes until it’s ok to start drinking.”

“Eight hours,” Nyota corrects.

“Three. At the most.”

Spock would like it, she thinks, Gaila’s turn of phrase.

She picks up the rest of her bagel and tears off half of it. 

“I just feel like he needs someone who is going to really care about him,” she says as she eats it.

“Like drop everything and be there for him?”

“Exactly.”

“Yes that would be nice for him to have,” Gaila says, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms.

Nyota just shakes her head again, pushing the last of her bagel around her plate. “He’s a mess. He’s just… a huge mess. He has what is obviously a really complicated relationship with his parents, he just got out of a fifteen? Twenty year relationship? And he has serious identity issues, who in their right mind would date him?”

“He’s hot, he’s nice, he’s great in bed, what the hell does all that matter?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nyota says. “Of course it doesn’t, we’re not dating. I was just saying.”

“Just saying what?”

“Just saying,” Nyota repeats.

“I’ll just say something,” Gaila says. “Ready? Half of Starfleet wants to do that man, he’s not going to stay single for long.”

“Yeah, I know, I keep telling him that,” Nyota says, taking the last bite of her bagel. “I mean, I should maybe tape a sign on his back that says something about him being ridiculously complicated, uncommunicative, and kind of disagreeable, but he could probably still be with whoever he wants.”

“Literally?” Gaila asks and Nyota shrugs as she swallows.

“Probably.”

“I’m not so sure,” Gaila says, still skewering Nyota with a look, which she ignores.

Nyota takes a quick glance around the café, but there’s nobody there that she recognizes. Cadets and officers who have been gone for the summer are only slowly starting to trickle back into the city as the beginning of the term draws near, but for now the café is thankfully empty of anyone she knows.

“I feel like he had a lot of condoms,” she says quietly, tossing her napkin on her plate and standing. “There was more than a couple in his drawer.”

“How many more?”

“Just more.”

“I think that’s great. I like to keep at least three dozen available at all times,” Gaila says as she starts to gather her own dishes. “And really, good for him for using them. I get so tired of everyone assuming that they’re not needed any more, nobody wants to get Denubian testicular pox, you know?”

“I guess so?”

“Exactly, that is not very fun, kind of puts a damper on everything, it’s so much better to use protection. Did he have any other fun stuff?”

“Fun?” Nyota repeats before realizing that was absolutely the last thing she should have asked for clarification on when they’re out in public, but her mind is still stuck on the fact that Gaila somehow needs more than thirty condoms at a time.

“Fun,” Gaila starts. “Handcuffs, blindfolds, maybe a-“

“Nope. No, nothing, just a lot of… You know what, never mind it’s not important.”

“It is so important,” Gaila says as they push in their chairs. “Because does this mean he never uses them and just has a lot left over? Does he normally have sex multiple times a night? Did he just buy a bunch recently? I wonder if he got a discount, I should ask him. And did he-“

“I don’t think I need to know,” Nyota says, picking up her plate and pushing her chair in. Spock’s sex life is his business, not hers, and what happened between them last night is never going to happen again, no matter how many condoms the man owns. “I never should have brought this up.”

“Think they’re new and he was planning for this to happen? Think he gets laid all the time and doing this with you this summer is severely cramping his sex style?” Gaila continues on unabated as they drop their dishes off at the counter.

“He doesn’t like people,” Nyota reminds her. “That’s kind of a necessary quality to have in order to use so many condoms.”

“False,” Gaila says, “I’ve screwed plenty of people I’ve never even spoken to.”

“C’mon, anyone can hear you.”

“And liking people aside, he apparently likes girls,” Gaila continues, unabated. “Oooh, and maybe guys? You should ask him, this could be important information. Was there lube? Did you look? I wonder what brand because-“

“-Gaila-“

“-I’m just saying that it might tell us which other species-“

“-Gaila-“

“-He’s normally fornicating with. See? That was a big word. And I’m thinking that-“

“-Gaila, please stop.”

“Um, nope. Because this is really, really valuable information as to-“

“-Gaila,” Nyota groans as she walks towards the door, giving her roommate a look that hopefully appropriately mixes ire and desperation.

“I’m ignoring you,” Gaila tells her. “Because-“

“-We’re a block from our dorm, can you please, please wait until we’re- Oh, sorry,” Nyota says, stepping out of the way of someone coming through the doors.

She steps back automatically, nudging Gaila slightly to the side so that they can move out of the other woman’s way.

“Right. So as I was saying,” Gaila continues and Nyota feels her roommate poke a finger into her arm. “Listen, Ny, this is important.”

But Nyota has turned to glance over her shoulder at the woman who just walked past them, sure that she knows her somehow.

And then the other woman also turns around and Nyota feels herself freeze.

“Ny,” Gaila is saying, poking her again. “You aren’t being fun, please be fun about this, this is the best thing that has happened to either of us all summer.”

“Hello,” the other woman says and Nyota has to work to get her mouth to produce words.

“Hi,” she responds, taking a step backwards, but Gaila is still there and Nyota nearly bumps into her.

The bagel she just ate threatens to rise through her throat as Spock’s mother silently watches her, and Nyota has to resist the urge to press her hand against her stomach to settle it.

“I’m Gaila,” Nyota finally hears as Gaila steps around her, breaking the silence with her cheerful greeting and outstretched hand.

“Amanda,” the other woman responds, looking down at Gaila’s hand before shaking it. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“This is-“ Nyota has to draw in a breath before she can continue. “This is Spock’s mother.”

“Really?” Gaila says and her smile is wide and happy as she clasps her hands together. “How wonderful, so nice to meet you too. Wow, this is amazing, this is so incredible.”

It takes Nyota a moment to get her hand to move, but then she’s grasped Gaila’s forearm and is tugging at her.

“We have to run,” she explains quickly, her words hurried and rushed and tumbling over each other. “Nice to see you again.”

Amanda just nods and doesn’t say anything and it makes Nyota want to smile because that’s where Spock gets that, that reticence to say goodbye, but it would be a fairly loopy and rather insane smile, all the craziness and madness of this situation rising out of her, so she tries to swallow it back and push it down as she steers Gaila out the door.

“What did she hear?” Nyota asks when they’re outside and the door has firmly slid shut behind them. She presses her fingers to her mouth, staring back at the café and trying to will her heart to stop pounding.

“Well, she was on the other side of a closed door standing next to a street full of traffic and we were talking in a loud room, so logically… everything?” Gaila says, still grinning. “His mom’s a looker. I can totally see where he gets it. Is his dad hot? You never said.”

“She hates me.”

“She doesn’t even know you.”

“No, she does not like me, not at all.”

“Oh, please, everyone likes you. People who have never met you like you. People who haven’t been born yet can’t wait to do group projects with you or be in your study group.”

“She thinks I’m terrible, that –“

“Why does it matter?” Gaila asks, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk so that a Tellarite has to step around her, his nose twitching as he glares up at her.

“It doesn’t matter, I didn’t say that it does.” Nyota buries her face in her palm and feels Gaila’s hand rub over her arm. “Just why did we have to be talking about… all that.”

“You should be more specific, you’re a linguist,” Gaila says cheerfully.

“I can’t believe I had to see her again,” Nyota groans, rubbing at her forehead. “I’m dropping out of school and I’m going to find a place to live on the Outer Rim where nobody knows me and I never have to be seen again.”

“Don’t forget about your paper, though.”

“My paper,” Nyota sighs, dropping her hand to stare at Gaila. “I can’t believe I ever wanted to write that thing.”

“Wow, don’t let it hear you say that, you two are so close, all those hours, all that time in the library together, to just turn your back on it? And when it’s a rough draft and it still needs so much work? Really, Ny, you should-“

“You are the worst,” Nyota informs her, which just makes Gaila smile wider.

Nyota has to look away from her roommate’s grin because she wants to stay mad, to hold onto that knot of annoyance and anger – at Gaila, at Spock, at herself for beginning any of this in the first place. It’s too hard, though, because Gaila’s always in such a good mood and seems incapable of being annoyed and is very rarely anything but cheerful and happy. It’s not the first time that Gaila has been able to lift Nyota out of a terrible mood. Gaila’s horrendous advice to start this whole thing with Spock aside, Nyota can’t think of anyone else she’d rather have next to her when running into a fake boyfriend’s mother, no matter that the whole thing is her fault.

“Gaila…” Nyota starts.

“Yep?”

“I want to tell you that-“

“Nyota?” she hears, the voice soft and tentative.

Nyota freezes, looking up at Gaila, who’s already smiling again. She turns slowly, reminding herself to take a deep breath.

“Hi,” she says, but then flounders for what comes next.

Luckily, Amanda continues without pausing.

“I – we, my husband and I just spoke with Spock.” She folds her hands in front of her and Nyota wonders if she’s supposed to respond to that. Maybe she should know by now how that conversation went, or maybe she should be on her way to see Spock, or maybe she should have her comm in her hand, expecting a call from him, but all she can think about is the look on Spock’s face when she left that morning and the ache that has suddenly taken up residence somewhere between her heart and her stomach.

“Great,” she gets out except that it’s not great, because somewhere along the way Spock decided that ending the most significant relationship in his life wasn’t something he could share with his parents and instead decided to stay silent about it for months, and Nyota never needed to know that, but she does.

“He had to go to work and my husband’s at the Embassy,” Amanda continues and Nyota thinks that maybe that should mean something to her, but it doesn’t. Her knowledge of the Vulcan Embassy extends to the fact that she and Spock had dinner at that restaurant, back when she was never going to be standing on a sidewalk talking to his mother the morning after spending the night with him.

“Ok,” she says carefully and wishes, desperately, that Gaila would do something other than stand there, silently staring back and forth between them.

“I don’t know if you’ve gotten a chance to speak to Spock, but Sarek and I are going to stay on Earth tonight before we go to Ganymede tomorrow so that we can have dinner with him.”

Nyota nods slowly, then gets out, “That sounds like fun.”

Except that she figures it will be anything but fun with a father and son who, apparently, can barely speak to each other. And she’s pretty sure that there’s a different way that she should have answered, something about being busy herself that evening, some invented plan or some commitment that she can’t get out of because Amanda’s nodding and something in her expression has eased.

“You’ll join us then.”

“Oh,” Nyota says, drawing in a quick breath. “Oh, I’m not sure, I-“

“I’m sorry that we met like that, last night,” Amanda says quickly, her words rapid like Spock’s sometimes get when he’s saying something that he wants her to listen to. “That wasn’t – we didn’t know. It would have been better, more pleasant to have met you in another way.”

They were never supposed to meet, but there they are standing on the sidewalk and there has to be someway to make this right, to undo everything that has led to this moment, to set her back on the correct course, the one that has her finishing her paper and starting classes and wiping this entire mess from her life, but she doesn’t know the words to make that happen.

All that she can find to say is, “I’m sorry, too.”

“Please come tonight,” Amanda says and Nyota has to glance away because Spock has her eyes and it’s too hard to look at her right then. “If you’d like to. It would be wonderful to get to know you a bit before we have to leave again.”

Nyota opens her mouth to say no, that she can’t, that they should spend the evening as a family, that she has a prior commitment, that she and Spock aren’t really at a meeting the parents stage because they’re not even dating each other. She should explain that there was her paper and the Ambassador and dilithium crystals and none of this should be happening, and that the last thing she or he wants to do is to sit at a dinner table with his mother and father, but instead of voicing any of that, she finds herself nodding because that somehow seems easier than coming up with the right words. The way out of all of this seems harder than the way through and she feels the verbs and nouns, clauses and subjects and predicates that she has built her career on, the ones that would have had her home and watching a movie with Gaila evaporate as she slides into yet another overly complicated situation, the knot that she and Spock are tying with this whole thing drawing a little tighter.

“Ok, great, sure,” she pushes past the hard lump in her throat before remembering that she’s a linguist and is speaking to a woman who thinks she’s in a relationship with her son. Her head is spinning, not that it’s ever really stopped ever since she walked into Spock’s office at the beginning of the summer and suggested this whole thing. “That would be lovely.”

“We’ll see you tonight then,” Amanda says and when she smiles, her eyes light up like Spock’s do.

“Fuck,” Nyota breathes out when the door to the café slides shut behind Amanda.

“Fuck,” Gaila agrees, her eyes still wide, even though she’s still smiling. “I can’t believe you agreed to that.”

Nyota raises her palm to cover her eyes. “I can’t either.”

“I guess he didn’t tell them what’s really going on,” Gaila says.

“What is there even to say?” Nyota asks, digging her fingertips into the corner of her eyes and trying to take a full breath. “How would he even start?”

“He could have made some slides, like for his lectures. Diagrams and charts and maybe a handout so that they could follow along.”

It nearly makes her smile, the idea of someone as uncommunicative as Spock is trying to explain to his parents exactly what she and him have been doing all summer, when he couldn’t even tell them that he broke up with his fiancée.

“That would be a disaster,” Nyota says. “He’d get two words into it and probably get up and leave the room.”

“Unmitigated disaster, absolutely.”

“He should have told them,” Nyota says quietly. She wonders if she should feel mad that he didn’t, but she mostly feels empty and hollow and drained.

“You can, if you want,” Gaila says and Nyota thinks of the cafe, thinks of Amanda in there, thinks of going inside and catching her arm and explaining that she and Spock aren’t really doing this. She wasn’t supposed to be there last night, she wasn’t supposed to be with him like that, meeting any of his family, being in his apartment, knowing anything at all about his ex-bondmate.

She tries to imagine explaining that to his mother, that her son is, in fact, single and therefore Nyota should really, really not be at dinner tonight, but she’s not sure she can bring herself to ever tell Spock that she had done so.

“I can’t,” she says softly to Gaila and she can only get the words out because she’s not looking at her.

“I know,” Gaila responds, her voice just as quiet.

Gaila tugs her hand back down, looping their arms together as they start walking back to their dorm, Nyota half numb.

“What were you going to tell me?” Gaila asks as they cross back under the Academy gates.

“What? When?”

“Earlier, before Spock’s mom caught up with us.”

It takes Nyota a minute to remember and when she does, she lets out a heavy sigh.

“Right. That. I was going to tell you how glad I am that you’re my roommate, but I’m actually thinking of taking that back, now that you gave me no help getting out of that.”

“Obviously you should be glad,” Gaila says, motioning to herself, waving her hands up and down her torso. “I’m the best, you should be so incredibly thankful.”

Gaila is always bringing men and women and other genders back to their room, always waking Nyota up in the middle of the night to tell her something, always borrowing her clothes without asking, and always begging Nyota for help with assignments when she leaves them until the last minute.

“I am,” Nyota says, pulling Gaila forward and folding her into a hug. “I got lucky with you.”

“Again, obviously,” Gaila says. She slowly hugs her back, like she’s confused at what has overcome Nyota. “Are you just figuring this out? Cause I’ve been telling you how amazing I am for years now.”

“I know, I know. And you owe me a drink because now I’m stuck having dinner with my fake boyfriend’s parents and that deserves a Cardassian Sunrise or two.”

“Or three,” Gaila grins, squeezing her tight. “I mean, it’s zero percent my fault that you’re eating with them but I’ll overlook that fact because it’s still morning and we have lots of time.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to the lovely albino-frog for reading this through! All remaining typos are, as ever, mine.

“It’ll be fine,” she assures him as she pulls on her boots, calling the words over towards where her comm is sitting on her desk.

“This is illogical.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, not for the first time, though by now her tone is colored with enough annoyance that she knows he can hear it, even if he’s ignoring it. “Do you want to tell them that I’m not coming?”

Silence greets both questions but it’s not like she was expecting anything different.

“I’m not telling them,” she says, since they’re his parents and it’s his problem and it’s really not her fault that she got dragged into this. That it’s easier to just go to dinner rather than try to get out of it she blames squarely on Spock, and how reticent he’s being is really not helping.

“Perhaps-“

“Spock,” she says firmly because the sooner she can get over there and eat, the sooner she can get back to her dorm. “Think of everything we’ve done this summer.”

“I do not-“

“-This is not the worst thing to have happened. Probably not even top ten.”

“What is at the beginning of your list?” he asks and she doesn’t answer the question as she zips up first one boot and then the other. Probably having Pike grinning at them from the car that night after dinner at Jardinière except that now when she thinks back on that, it was kind of funny. Maybe the drive out to Mojave, but that too wasn’t all that bad in the end. 

“Our disagreement?” he’s asking and she realizes that her hands have stilled on the top of her boot.

“What?” she asks, trying to think of what he’s talking about. 

“In the mess hall.”

She finds that she can’t help but laugh at the memory.

“I forgot about that,” she admits as she stands and checks her hair in the mirror. It feels like that might have happened to two different people and even though her cheeks get a little flushed at the memory of raising her voice at him like that, it also make a smile tug at her lips. 

When he speaks, she’s pretty sure that he’s smiling, too. “If you have forgotten the incident, then perhaps you have forgotten the way in which you-“

“-Oh don’t even try, Spock-“

“-Were culpable in-“

“-Stop, stop it, you’re terrible. Literally, you were so-“

“-If you are going to speak of what literally happened, then-“

“-Nope,” she says, cutting him off. She grabs her comm when Gaila steps out of their bathroom, and she turns around so that she won’t have to explain to her roommate why she’s grinning so wide. “Look, I’ll see you in a couple minutes and we’re going to have lots of fun, I promise.”

“We will do no such thing.”

“K, I’ll have fun, you just sit there,” she says, trying to keep her tone light. It’s not too far of a stretch to imagine that Spock will just sit there, silent and withdrawn. Though by now she’s grown used to him like that and the thought of him drawing inwards, being overly quiet and reserved doesn’t bother her as much as it once might have. She’s perfectly capable of having a normal, simple meal with the three of them, no matter how he acts.

Probably.

“You look nice,” Gaila says as Nyota flicks her comm shut and finishes fixing her hair. “I like that skirt.”

“Am I crazy for doing this?” she asks.

“Yes.”

Nyota lets out a long breath, her hands pressed to her hips as she looks helplessly at her roommate.

“How did I get myself into this again?”

“Me,” Gaila says happily and is still smiling when Nyota leaves their room.

…

“You are a cadet,” Sarek states as Nyota lays the last fork on the table. It’s not the first one of his direct statements that borders enough on a question that she’s not entirely sure how to respond. The intensity and gravity of the way he speaks to her makes her doubt that she is, in fact, a cadet, as if there’s a good chance she’d get such an answer wrong.

She takes a moment to make sure that the fork is sitting neatly in the exact middle of the perfectly folded napkin before she looks up. The evening so far hasn’t been completely terrible, but she still feels the back of her neck prickle in the quiet, and she’s felt rather hot and flushed since she got to Spock’s apartment, like her skin is too tight, a feeling that grows every time his parents look at her. 

“I am,” she confirms.

“You are studying xenolinguistics.”

“Yes,” she says looking up from where Spock is adjusting the fork on the napkin with his good hand. He’s been doing that all night and she wants to tell him to stop and she would, except that it just doesn’t seem right to do so in front of his parents.

“What are your eventual goals for your career?”

“I’m interested primarily in what types of effects First Contacts have on a society’s language,” she tells him, the same sentence that she’s said to a dozen officers, to numerous other students, and to friends and family from back home when they ask her what she’s working on. It’s repetitive, comfortable, and while answering his questions at times makes her stumble for words, it’s really not the most unpleasant conversation that could be happening. She had been half expecting something much worse, but this she can handle even though she feels like she might have thought to bring her resume.

“Do you wish to be assigned to the Enterprise?” Sarek asks.

She glances at Spock, whose attention is still on the fork. “I’m sure most of my class will be applying for that posting,” she says before she realizes that she didn’t answer the question that he posed. Or, rather that if it were Amanda asking that might have been a sufficient response, but not one that is adequate for a Vulcan. But other than a quiet greeting, Amanda’s been mostly silent since Nyota arrived and Sarek has been talking to her instead, peppering her with these types of questions ever since Spock hung up her coat. “Yes, I do.”

“Are there opportunities at the Academy to study First Contacts?”

“Only after the fact from mission reports and the first data gathered by later Federation envoys, so no, not really, not in the way I’d be able to if I were a comm officer on a starship. I’m focusing more broadly on sociolinguistics for most of my current research.”

“Most?” Sarek asks and she wishes she had thought to be more precise.

“I do a fair amount of reading into linguistic anthropology and theories of cultural relativity,” she says as she starts setting down knives and can’t help but wonder if she should clarify what those are with more specificity, or if Sarek might already know. Or if it’d be logical for him to ask or if it is, in fact, logical for her to explain without him requesting the information. 

She can’t decide and doesn’t want to choose the wrong option, and by the time she’s finished carefully setting out the knives as she thinks through what she might say, Sarek is asking her another question.

“How many languages do you speak?”

She starts to list them and then stops when she notices that Amanda has turned away from the stove to look at her.

“Uh, a couple of others, too,” she finishes, then presses her lips together. A lot of others, but she doesn’t like how his parents are staring at her.

“You have been to Omicron Circini II?” Sarek asks and she quickly shakes her head, putting her hands on the back of a chair for something to do with them.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then why did you learn Circinian?”

“It’s very similar to Menkalinian,” she explains. That’s logical, she’s pretty sure, to have just learned both at once. Efficient, at the very least. Which she could point out and maybe she should, but it might also be apparent and easily deduced that learning languages in such a methodological manner would make the most sense and it would be too obvious to voice that.

“You have been to Menkalinia Prime?” Sarek asks.

“No.”

Sarek falls silent again and returns his attention to his tea. Nyota glances up at Spock, but he’s not looking back on her, focused on adjusting one of his chairs instead, so that it’s perfectly pushed into the table.

“Where were you raised?” Sarek asks as they sit down to eat and Nyota turns her attention from Spock ladling soup into her bowl to his father instead.

“Mombasa, Kenya.”

“In Africa.”

“Yes.”

“What are your parents’ occupations?”

“My father’s a professor of chemical engineering and my mother teaches terraforming practicums,” she answers and she can feel Spock glance at her. She’s not sure if she ever told him that, that her parents are scientists like he is.

“Where did you study before attending Starfleet Academy?”

“I have a degree from the Institute of Advanced Mathematics.”

“In what, specifically?”

“I focused on multi-level modeling of individual’s language learning rate and retention, specifically those who were learning Standard as a second language.” 

That, she’s pretty sure Spock knows, if for no other reason than he took it upon himself to research her academic qualifications. Which was strange and weird, but at least helped her avoid this type of questioning from him, back when they first started this whole thing.

“You have dramatically changed the subject of your research.”

“There are a lot more opportunities here that weren’t available to me when I was an undergrad,” she says, then corrects herself. “Undergraduate, I mean. Also, studying sociolinguistics opens up more career options once I earn my commission, since Starfleet’s universal translators are so advanced that much of that research is done by our computer scientists, not the xenolinguistics department.” 

“That was Spock’s area of focus as a cadet,” Sarek says.

She glances over at Spock again, who’s studying his soup and doesn’t seem to feel the need to look up at his father when he speaks about him nor respond to the comment. She maybe knew that he worked on them, something someone in the department might have said at some point, or something she gleaned from Gaila, but it’s not like they’ve spent much of the summer actually devoting any effort to get to know each other.

She starts to ask if he still works on them now, then catches herself. She should know that and quizzing Spock on his work isn’t going to exactly look all that good. She doesn’t exactly want to pop the fragile, soap bubble feel of a dinner with Spock’s parents.

“How has your trip been so far?” she asks instead.

“Acceptable,” Sarek answers.

She nods and tempers her urge to ask whether finding out that their son is no longer engaged knocked that response down a peg from ‘satisfactory’ since she would not only never say that in the first place, but it’s also none of her business or her concern. Whatever issues exist between Spock and his parents are theirs to worry about and she’s just… there. At dinner with them.

She slowly stirs her soup, waiting for it to cool down enough to eat. When she glances over at Amanda, she’s not eating yet either and while she glances up return Nyota’s look, the other woman remains silent.

Nyota should say something, but she can’t come up with a topic and can’t think of anything that might be interesting and she doesn’t know Spock’s parents well enough to just jump into a conversation. So instead of speaking, she just watches the steam rise from her soup and listens to the quiet of Spock’s apartment.

If it were just the two of them, she’d tell him how much of her paper she had gotten done over the afternoon but she’s not entirely sure that his parents know that he’s serving as her advisor for the summer and that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she exactly wants to get into with them. Maybe it doesn’t matter and maybe it’s logical or something like that, but she’s not about to offer up information about being their son’s student, not if they think that she’s also dating him.

“When does the semester begin?” Sarek finally asks and Nyota looks up from her bowl. She rests her spoon against the side of it and folds her hands in her lap for something to do with them under the weight of his gaze.

“Next week.”

“Humans often appear to posses a mixture of excitement and apprehension at such an occurrence.”

“That’s accurate,” she says.

“Have you finalized your courses?”

“Not yet.”

She expects him to ask what she’s thinking about taking, but he doesn’t, and she waits a beat too long, past when it would be normal for her to offer the information herself. 

She goes back to stirring her soup and only takes a small bite when she’s mostly sure that she can eat it without burning her mouth.

“This is delicious,” she says into the silence. It’s not what she ate with Spock the other night, but a dish similar enough that she can guess why he’s partial to both.

“It’s an old favorite,” Amanda says, smiling at her son.

“Having such strong preferences for food is illogical,” Spock says and Nyota slowly turns from her bowl to look over at him.

“Really?” she asks.

“That is what I said.”

She glances at his father, who’s eating silently, then back at him.

“I just wouldn’t have guessed that,” she says and can’t quite resist smiling at him.

“Why?”

“Because,” she answers, turning back to her own dinner.

It’s really very good. The vegetables aren’t cut into perfect cubes like what Spock had served her and there’s something rather charming about the varied sizes. There’s also something rather endearing about the fact that Spock seems to really like soup, if it’s what he made for himself and also what his mother cooked for him.

“When Spock was a cadet, he worked as an intern in the Computer Sciences Department,” Sarek finally says and when Nyota looks up at him, she realizes that the comment was directed at her.

“I didn’t know that,” she says, glancing at Spock, then over at his father.

“Do you cultivate similar experiences outside of your coursework?”

“I’m-“ she starts, then darts a look over at Spock again. She wouldn’t if not for him. She would have never looked up available jobs or even thought that she might without his suggestion. “Yes, I’m starting to.”

“You will be much busier with the added responsibility,” Sarek says.

“I’m trying not to think about that,” she admits, no matter how illogical it is. She also can’t help but glance at Spock again, wondering if she’ll even be able to manage it. He did and still graduated at the top of his class, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll be easy for her.

“Well these last few days of summer must be nice for you two,” Amanda says and Nyota jerks her gaze away from Spock to focus on her dinner instead.

It is nice to have a bit of summer left, but not because she’s exactly expecting to spend it with Spock. She’ll most likely see him, but not how Amanda’s imagining, so she just takes a bite of her soup and then another, trying to think of any response that might suggest that she and Spock will be spending the next week in each other’s company, having a few last days together as a couple. She can’t and it just seems simpler to keep eating than to try to say anything else.

“This was really delicious, thank you,” Nyota says, later, when dinner is over and she’s spooning leftover soup into a container. 

Amanda gives her a small smile, glancing over at her from where she’s washing dishes.

“I’m glad that you enjoyed it,” she says as she turns back to the plate she’s rinsing.

It would be easier to just keep quiet since Amanda doesn’t seem predisposed to talking to her, but it’s just too silent in the kitchen if they’re not going to speak, even with the distraction of cleaning up from the meal.

“Spock made something similar the other night. And we went out and I got…” she starts, even if she can’t remember the right word. She presses her lips together, trying to recall the name of the dish as she puts the container of leftovers in Spock’s fridge. “Balk’ra mashya? Does that sound right?”

“Yes, it does,” Amanda says, setting the plate in the dish drainer. Nyota automatically picks it up, dries it, and puts it into the correct cupboard. “You went out to get it? May I ask where?”

“There’s a Vulcan restaurant by HQ, not that far from the Embassy,” Nyota says as she picks up the clean silverware and starts sorting it into the right drawer.

“I’ve never been. I admit that whenever we visit Earth, I rather look forward to Terran cuisine.”

“Like coffee?” Nyota asks, thinking of that morning. Then she remembers exactly what Gaila had been talking about and feels her cheeks heat, turning quickly back towards the silverware drawer and willing herself to take her mind off of their conversation and the night she spent with Spock that prompted the discussion in the first place.

Amanda either didn’t hear what she and Gaila were talking about or has the grace to pretend she didn’t, because she just gives Nyota another tiny smile.

“Exactly.” 

Amanda finishes the rest of the plates and has just started to wash the glasses when Nyota notices her glance towards Spock and Sarek, who are trading stilted, halting conversation in the living room.

Nyota can’t help but also look, but then glances away again to focus on lining up Spock’s spoons as neatly as possible so that she doesn’t have to watch the way he and his father are trying to carry on a conversation.

“It was a good restaurant,” Nyota offers into the silence that’s sitting between her and Amanda.

“Was it?” Amanda asks.

“It was great, and fun to go to, I’d never been there before.”

“Well, it’s lovely that Spock took you there,” Amanda says and before Nyota can stop herself she huffs out a quiet laugh, shaking her head.

“Sorry,” she says quickly because her reaction makes Amanda look at her. She really looks like her son when she does that, a similar curiosity crossing her face, which only makes Nyota smile again. She slides the silverware drawer shut as she explains, “He didn’t take me there, I suggested it. Well, rather I told him that we should have dinner and he didn’t have any ideas of where we should go, so it seemed like it would be a good choice.”

“And it was,” Amanda says and Nyota nods, still smiling.

“Definitely,” she confirms. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Amanda that since it pushes close to the fact that it wasn’t really a date, but that fact didn’t stop it from still being as enjoyable an evening as possible under the circumstances. She dries the first glass that Amanda sets in the dish drainer and glances towards Spock again, debating whether she should elaborate on the topic before finally settling on saying, “I’m not entirely sure what he’s told you about us.”

Not that they’re not dating, she’s fairly sure, and knowing Spock he might have just been completely silent on the entire topic.

“That you’ve been seeing each other since the beginning of the summer.”

She smiles down at the second glass she’s drying. “How detailed.”

Amanda gives her a soft smile. “It took nearly a year until I found out that he had made friends with Doctor Puri.”

That makes Nyota grin again. “I’d probably be in the same boat, except that Puri found us in the mess hall one day.”

Stoyer found them too, while they were working in the student union and thinking about her makes Nyota glance at Amanda again, then over at Sarek. It makes her wonder how Amanda and Sarek ever got together and what that possibly could have been like.

Probably nothing like her and Spock, not that they’re actually dating. They’re having dinner with his parents and then Nyota’s going to go back to her dorm and she’s going to send him what she got written of her paper that afternoon. The term is starting soon and then it’ll be back to real life, her hours filled with classes and training sims and homework, and she’ll be busy enough that these hours spent with Spock will soon be far in her past. She has no idea what it will be like between them when the semester starts, but with Taele still around campus or not, Nyota will hardly have time to see him.

He sees her looking and crosses over to the kitchen, pulling the cabinet door open and putting the glasses away as she dries them. She can feel the heat of his body since he’s standing so close to her and she should slide down the counter further from him, but his parents think they’re dating anyway, and it’s not unpleasant to be right there next to him.

“I was telling your mom about the time we went to that Vulcan restaurant,” she says, handing him the last glass. She leans back against the counter and while he doesn’t join her in resting against it, he also doesn’t move away from her after closing the cupboard. 

“It sounded like a pleasant evening,” Amanda says as she wipes down the sink. Nyota’ll have to remember that, to replace ‘fun’ with ‘pleasant’, since Spock nods in agreement.

“Sepak was there.”

“I haven’t seen him in a long time,” Amanda says and Nyota can see a wistful smile cross the other woman’s face. “How is he? Was he there with his wife?”

“Yes,” Spock answers, but doesn’t respond to his mother’s first question. He didn’t speak to anyone other than the waiter that night and Nyota wants to be able to remember well enough who else was in the room to try to guess at who Sepak and his wife were, but she can’t.

“He was a coworker of Spock’s father when Spock was very young,” Amanda explains and just the idea of Spock being young makes Nyota smile.

“How young?” she asks, looking up at him beside her.

“Immaterial.”

“He was four,” Amanda says and Spock immediately slips the washcloth from her hand and begins wiping down the counter, turning away from the conversation.

“How cute,” she says, grinning at his back.

“Let me show you something,” Amanda says quickly and steps out of the kitchen for just long enough to retrieve something from her coat. It’s her wallet, which is Terran in design and somehow strikingly odd against her Vulcan robes. She slips out a tiny filmplast, the kind of which Nyota hasn’t seen in ages since they’re rather outdated. She realizes why when Amanda hands it to her, drawing in a quick, delighted breath at what’s on it.

“Mother,” Spock says, turning at the sound and Nyota can’t help but reach out to jostle his elbow.

“Spock, you were adorable.”

“That is illogical, as that picture was taken when I was three years and five months old. You were referencing an event that occurred when I was four, so therefore logically-“

“Do you have any more?” Nyota asks, squeezing his arm before drawing her hand back so that she can better tilt the filmplast towards the light. He was really, really cute, an expression that threatened to be close to a smile on his face, as he looked up from the book he was reading into the camera.

“At home,” Amanda says, carefully taking it back and smiling down at the picture. “I’ve had this one with me for a while now.”

“Humans do not have as excellent memories as Vulcans, so it is therefore rational to possess and display such items,” Sarek says as he walks over to join them, his attention on the picture in his wife’s hands. “If you visit Vulcan, you can be assured that Amanda will show you the rest of her photographs.”

“That’s…” Nyota starts as she feels the easy moment, the little rush of excitement that had been sitting warm in her chest burst and drain out of her at the thought. She glances at Spock, but he’s turned to clean the counter again, his back to them. “That’s very kind.”

“You have obligations to the Academy, it would therefore follow that it would be difficult to find opportunities to travel,” Sarek says.

“That’s certainly true,” she nods and lets him think that that’s all of it, even though the omission of the real reason sits heavy in her stomach.

“I understand,” Sarek says, looking over at Spock, who hasn’t turned around again.

They don’t stay much longer after that and before Nyota quite knows it, she’s saying goodbye to them, glancing away as Spock trades a stilted farewell with his father and a much warmer one with his mother.

She doubts his parents have even had time to leave the building before he’s unwinding the bandage on his hand.

“Really?” she asks.

“It is healed.”

“Healed enough that you wouldn’t have minded your mother seeing it?”

He doesn’t answer, just walks off towards his bathroom. It leaves her standing by his door, alone, staring at it and then towards his bedroom where he disappeared, then back at his door.

She should go.

She should also find out exactly how healed his hand is and if she should be expecting Puri to come find her if she lets Spock walk around campus injured.

“Manners,” she says when he gets back. 

“Pardon?”

In the beginning of the summer him walking away and leaving her there would have made something in her rush with heat, her stomach tighten and words that she can’t say to a senior officer sit in her throat, but now it just makes her sigh and hold her hands out for his.

“I am fine.”

“Kind of,” she allows because his hand actually does look better but she isn’t about to give him the satisfaction of saying so. She lets her fingers play over his, turning his hand palm up so that she can prod at his skin, and then over again in order to rub her thumb along the back of his hand until she’s satisfied.

And then she realizes how she’s holding his hand, what exactly she’s doing to him and yanks her hands back from him.

“Glad it’s better,” she finally tells him, speaking into the silence between them.

She doesn’t need to be there if his hand is healed. Dinner is over, he doesn’t need help with his bandage, and there’s nothing more for her to do except head back to her dorm and maybe get a few more hours of work done on her paper.

She thinks that he’s about to say goodbye to her and she glances over at her shoes. She nearly takes a step towards them, but he speaks before she can.

“I retrieved the applications for Acoustical Engineering and Advanced Morphology from the Xenolinguistics Department today. I can give them to you now, if you would like.”

She should go, but instead she nods.

He has to sort through a stack of padds on his desk to find them and while he does, she sits on his couch and tries not to look at how his shoulders and back shift under his shirt.

He joins her, sitting closer to her than he might need to, but she could move away and she doesn’t. Her elbow bumps into his arm as she takes the first padd from him and she’s aware of how alone they are, his parents no longer a buffering presence between them. Now it’s just him and her in his apartment and that thought is making her skin prick with heat.

“I don’t know which job would be a better choice,” she says, focusing on the padds instead of his body so near to hers. She wishes that last night had been worse, that the awkwardness between them had solidified into an experience so terrible that she has no desire to repeat it, but her body is informing her that isn’t the case and she wills the flush of heat growing in her stomach to stop.

“I believe that in all likelihood, you would be successful in either capacity,” he says and she wishes his voice wasn’t so low and quiet like that. They should go sit at his table to talk about this, not be so near to each other on the couch that their knees keep brushing.

“Is Acoustical Engineering focused much on computer programming?” she asks, leaning over to peer at the padd he’s still holding instead of standing up and putting a couple of feet between their bodies, or even just scooting slightly farther away from him.

“At times.”

She tries to focus on her other question, but every time she breathes, she all she can think about is how good he smells.

“Who’s teaching Advanced Morphology?” she asks as he hands her the padd, his fingers brushing lightly against hers. She puts both padds in her lap and laces her fingers together, trying to ignore how the touch of his skin on hers make the back of her hand prick and tingle.

“Lieutenant Wyke.”

“I like her, she’d be good to work for.”

“Indeed,” he says, nodding.

“Going to miss your old job?” she asks and lets her knee bump against his in a friendly gesture, except that it makes heat race across her skin.

“That is an emotional response.”

“Still,” she says, letting her eyes trace over the line of his throat as he swallows.

“I found teaching the subject agreeable.”

She can’t help but smile at the memory of him as her professor, that first day of class when she was very nearly terrified of how stern he seemed and how much he expected from them. Now, he’s sitting so close to her that she can see how his chest rises as he breathes and she can notice every shade of brown in his eyes, and their faces are so near to each other that it’s only the smallest movement forward that would bring her mouth to his. She shouldn’t but she does anyway, kissing him until he starts to kiss her back.

It’d be easier if he weren’t so good at this, if the way he kisses wasn’t so meticulous, so incredibly focused and careful that she can feel a flush slowly spread through her entire body as his lips tug at hers. It makes her feel languid, makes her kiss him back leisurely, meeting his measured, deliberate movements without haste.

When she lays her arms across his shoulders, lets her fingers play over his neck and the back of his head, she feels him take the padds from her lap and put them on the table without breaking their kiss, and then spread his hands on her thighs, warmth seeping across her.

The way he kisses her, that careful way he touches her is different than other men she’s known and it just makes her want more of him, to seek out that contrast like it’s something to be explored, but she won’t let herself. She feels the urge to start pulling at his shirt grow and she wants to draw him over her on the couch, let him tangle the fingers he has on the back of her head into her hair, so she finally breaks their kiss, turning slightly to the side so that she can feel his exhale against her cheek.

She could say that this is a bad idea, but she’s sure he knows that, so instead she makes herself drop her hands from him, leans back until his hands slide away from her body and there’s distance between them that she doesn’t really want, but which she forces herself to maintain.

“Can we get together soon to go over my paper?” she asks to fill the quiet that descends between them.

She can feel his eyes on her as she runs her fingers over her hair to straighten it, but she can’t look at him because she’ll just kiss him again.

“When would be convenient?” he asks and when she does glance at him, she has to ignore how his mouth is still wet.

“Couple days from now?” she asks with a light shrug before realizing that she can’t actually be so cavalier about it. Classes are starting sooner than she likes to think about and that means she needs to get her paper done, edited, and sent off to whichever journal she wants to submit it to. 

“Thursday?”

It’s easier to focus on whether that would be a good day than on how soft his lips are, the way he makes her breath catch.

“That’d be fine,” she says because she’s free all week, and that’s something to remember, to cling to and enjoy since her schedule is about to very, very suddenly change and these types of long evenings, these hours she spends with him are going to evaporate like they were never there to begin with. That’s fine, though. She spent most of the summer wishing he wasn’t in her life to begin with, so she’s sure that slipping back into the semester will be easy enough, like returning to a normal that’s been so absent that she can barely remember it but will surely be good. Simple. Right.

“Are you well?”

“What?” she asks, blinking at him and realizing she had dropped her gaze to the floor. She has to shake herself a bit at the sound of his voice, the way it jerks her away from her thoughts and back to him sitting beside her. She’s not going to have that anymore, the way he watches her so closely, something on his face that she can’t quite place but might well be concern. Her wandering thoughts must have shown on her face and he really doesn’t need to be worried about her because she’s fine. The term is starting and that’s good and fine and acceptable and she should tell him that, should use his own word on him but it seems too lighthearted to actually accomplish. Instead, she nods towards his door. “Yeah, I’m fine, I should go.”

And that thought of going brings her up short. She’s going to walk out of here, go back to her dorm, and when she sees him again, it’ll be about her paper. Not another weekend, another dinner, anything to do with his coworkers or his parents or anything else like that, just a handful of padds and a quiet table and their work spread between them.

“Look,” she starts and she can hear how hesitant her own voice sounds. She expects some comment from him about having said that – it’s illogical to tell him to observe something when she really wants him to listen, or that he can see her clearly, or clarification as to what he should focus on, but he’s quiet. His silence makes her press her lips together, her mouth drawing into a tight smile as she thinks about slipping back into her life where he’s her advisor, a professor overseeing her paper, not someone who she should be kissing on his couch, late in the evening when they’re alone in his apartment. She’s not going to be in his apartment again and that means that they need to be able to leave this all behind. “Last night was…”

She gets out those words and then stops and finds that she can’t quite look at him.

She can feel his focus on her, that way she knows that he’s watching her without needing to glance at him to confirm it and she searches for how to finish her thought, even though the weight of his attention is only further distracting her.

“Regrettable?” he finally asks and she jerks her gaze back to him.

“No, I wasn’t going to say that.” Her words are quick and firm and it’s not until she’s spoken them that she can really process what he said. “Is that… is that what you think?”

The thought makes something in her stomach heavy and slightly sick and she shouldn’t have just kissed him, not if he thinks that about last night.

“Regret is an emotional response.”

“Right,” she says and makes herself nod even though his words are sitting like lead in her stomach.

When he speaks again after a long pause, his voice is soft. “I do not think that.”

“Ok.” She reaches up and smooths her hand over her hair before gripping the back of her neck. 

“Nyota?” he asks and she realizes that she’s been quiet for too long.

“I just think that maybe we should talk about it,” she says and tries to make her hand drop back down but instead digs her fingers into her own skin. They should talk about it and she shouldn’t have kissed him again, or probably slept with him, or been in his apartment at all, not yesterday and not now.

“Very well.”

“Good.”

It’s quiet again and she finally drags her attention from somewhere past his shoulder to look up at him.

“I presumed you had a more specific topic of conversation.”

“I don’t.”

“I see.”

They just stare at each other and she turns to press her cheek against the inside of her forearm.

“Just that…” she starts, then trails off again.

When she looks back at him, he’s staring right at her like he can somehow divine what words are going to come next.

“This is a curious conversation,” he says into the silence.

“Well…”

“Is this some type of human convention?”

She lets the ghost of a smile play across her mouth. “No.”

“Do you often have such trouble expressing yourself in your time as a communication track cadet?”

If he had asked her that in the beginning of the summer, she probably would have walked away without stopping for her shoes, but now it just makes the smile tugging at her lips a little wider.

“No.”

“You speak a variety of languages, perhaps this would best be done in one other than Standard?”

“Maybe,” she allows and when she looks up at him again, he’s not exactly smiling, but he’s not exactly not smiling, either. It’s the slightest quirk at the corner of his mouth, one that isn’t normally there and it makes her cheeks heat.

She drops her hand, smooths it down her stomach and then tugs at the hem of her shirt.

“Stop,” she instructs when he hasn’t stopped with that look that is very, very nearly one of amusement.

“I am not doing anything.”

“You think I’m being ridiculous.”

“That is inaccurate.”

“I’m not so sure,” she says and then has to look away again because he’s still kind of smiling and he is very definitely teasing her.

If he had been like this at the end of last semester the entire summer might have been different – way more enjoyable, much easier.

But, then again if he had been like this, if probably anyone else knew that he even could be like this, he wouldn’t have been single.

He’s still single, she reminds herself, but that doesn’t mean she should be kissing him like she did.

“Last night was fun,” she says and it’s kind of a stretch but she really can’t have him thinking that she in any way regrets it. The line between it being a bad decision and it being regrettable is a wide one with him. Not with all men, but he’s considerate and respectful and uses condoms and maybe last night was a bit awkward but this entire summer has been awkward and that hasn’t exactly made her stop. Really, she’s just getting used to it in a way that makes her wonder what her life will be like when that unease and discomfort is suddenly absent.

She doesn’t have her shoes on yet. They’re sitting right there and she could walk over, slip them on, and be gone from his apartment, walk down his hall, head back to her dorm and spend the evening with Gaila, but instead she looks over at him, meeting his soft gaze before letting her eyes trace over his face.

It’s pretty impossible to not look at his mouth, so she stops trying.

“Um,” she says. “I just don’t want this to be weird or uncomfortable.”

“Those are human emotions.”

“Sure, right,” she nods, thinking about how nicely he kisses. “Can we just make sure this is going to be ok between us?”

“As I am sufficiently in control of my emotions as to ensure that does not happen, you will have to describe the parameters of how you best expect to achieve that.”

He’s considerate and respectful and uses condoms but he’s also still a bit annoying and she huffs out a long breath, letting her lips twist together as she looks up at him. 

“Just by not being awkward.”

“I see,” he says slowly, then tips his head to the side and she swears he’s laughing at her, his eyes bright in a way that’s making something in her chest flit around. “Is that a proven method?”

“I don’t… do this a lot.”

“Establish scientific methods? That is becoming rapidly apparent.”

“Spend just one night with someone,” she clarifies because she’s not going to call last night a one night stand. That would feel cheaper, somehow, or just less than what it was. Something she might do with a stranger, but not him. And it is uncommon for her, not that it’s any of his business, but it feels important that he knows that. It also feels important that she break the slight edge of nerves that are starting to jangle in her stomach at such an admission, since talking about her personal life with him isn’t exactly something she’s necessarily comfortable with. “Especially not with research advisors.”

“Have you had many research advisors?”

She smiles, just a little. “No.”

“I see.”

Maybe he does get around a lot, like Gaila was suggesting. It’s not hard to imagine with how he looks, or the way his shirt fits him, or the number of condoms he has.

It makes something in her feel a little bit hollow, that idea that what for her is an aberration might for him just be another evening.

She presses her hands to the top of her thighs, about to stand up since she suddenly very much wants to get out of there.

“I should go.”

She makes it to his front door before she realizes that he’s followed her.

“I do not either.”

“What?” she asks, trying to make sense of his words over the hot rush they’ve caused in her mind. How he’s looking at her is making her neck feel too warm and she wishes that he would find something else to stare at.

“Really?” she finally asks.

“I would not tergiversate.”

“Nice word,” she says, but what she really means is that his mouth looks really nice when he says it.

“Your issue is that it happened once?” he finally asks since neither of them have said anything else. She’s been busy looking at his lips and then away again, unable to keep her focus away from his body and unwilling to simply give into the urge to touch him.

She shouldn’t. It’s not a good idea. Once was enough – too much probably and she needs to put her boots on, walk out of his apartment and let the coolness of the late summer evening calm the heat that races through her body and pools in her stomach.

“It sounds like you’re pushing for repeated trials,” she hears herself say before she can stop it from coming out of her mouth, but damn him, her entire chest feels warm and her skin is prickling with him looking at her like that.

“Is that your suggestion?”

“No,” she answers quickly but she’s looking at his mouth again. She makes herself turn away, pressing her tongue into the corner of her lips and trying for a deep breath, even though she can’t quite manage one. She should go, leave the conversation at that, but she can no more do that than she can tear her focus from his body.

This is Gaila’s fault, probably, for the very fact that Nyota will have to go back tonight and listen to her talk about sex. Or it’s Spock’s fault for sleeping with her in the first place. Or Olson’s for ordering that O-ring for that valve that resulted in her being in Spock’s apartment last night. Or it’s the Ambassador’s for wanting to see the ship yesterday or Pike’s for hiring Spock or whoever had the bright idea to build the Enterprise, or the admissions officer that ever let her into the Academy so that she’s even standing there, thinking about what Spock looks like without clothes on and how good last night felt, his body firm and strong under hers, his hand palming along her body. She swears she can feel the echo of it, the memory of his hand on her skin from last night, his fingers splayed on her thighs just moments ago, how his mouth feels against hers when they kiss.

“Maybe?” she says even though she tells herself not to.

“Maybe?” he repeats, echoing her and she should tell him that’s an illogical response, but she doesn’t.

She’s getting too good at ignoring that voice of reason that tells her not to as she lets herself step towards him instead of making herself go home.

She watches her hand reach out to snag the hem of his shirt between her fingers. The fabric is soft and it’s warm from his body and all she can think about is his flat, tight stomach and narrow waist. 

“This is the last time,” she tells him and herself.

“That is acceptable,” he says and when she tugs at his shirt, he grabs it and strips it off over his head. His hand finds her hip and he pushes her back a step towards his bedroom, his body grazing against hers.

“I mean it,” she tells him, palming the smooth skin over hipbones as he backs her up another step.

She was leaving and now she’s being walked back into his bedroom, but it’s logical. Or something. She’s pretty sure. And it doesn’t really matter because she has her fingertips pressed beneath his waistband, seeking out more of his skin and he’s close enough to kiss, his nose bumping against hers and his breath on her mouth.

“Duly noted.”

She can’t see behind her and isn’t going to turn to look, but she lets him keep walking her backwards until she feels the end of his bed brush against her calves.

“I’m serious.”

He has her skirt shoved up, his hand exploring the curve of her ass.

“I am aware.”

“As long as we’re on the same page,” she says and then his mouth is on hers and she has his pants unbuttoned and his palm is spread on her back as he kneels on the bed and lowers her down onto the mattress.

She squirms out of the rest of her clothes as fast as she can, wanting his hot skin pressed against hers and his hands on her bare body. She tilts her chin up towards the ceiling so that his mouth can work over her neck, then down across her collarbone, eager and seeking as she scratches her nails over the back of his head.

“Off,” she says, reaching down to yank at his waistband. She gets them shoved far enough down that she can fill her hands with the curves of his ass, feeling the muscle flex as he kicks his pants the rest of the way down.

“Acceptable?” he asks when he’s leaning back over her, his hands braced next to her on the pillows and his head and shoulders dipping down so that their mouths can meet again and again.

“Are you still wearing socks?” she gets out, mumbled against his lips.

“No.”

“Good.”

“Would that have been a problem?” he asks into the underside of her jaw, the words accompanied by a hot wash of his breath so that she tightens her fingers into his shoulders.

“Just want this to be expeditious.”

“Truly?” he asks, pulling back enough to look at her.

“No,” she grins, then presses her hips up into him, where he’s hard against her thigh. 

The light in his living room is still on, so she can see him sit back on his heels to put the condom on, her eyes riveted on the sight of his hand on himself, the way he leans forward over her and guides himself in.

“Nyota?” he asks and she realizes that she hasn’t let out the breath she pulled in. It’s lodged somewhere in her lungs, caught in the feeling of him pressing into her.

Instead of answering, she nods, her mouth dry and open as he pushes gently, further inside her.

“Slow,” she requests and where her hands are spread on his lower back, she feels his muscles tighten, tensing against the urge to move.

She might have asked that they take a few more minutes before letting him press into her, but he feels so good inside of her that she can’t really care, can only draw her knees back and press her face into his throat until she feels the deep stretch and strain of him in her ease.

“Good,” she tells him and is surprised to find that she was even biting at her lip when he shifts his weight onto one forearm in order to raise his hand and draw it out from between her teeth.

“You are certain?” he asks, his thumb rubbing back and forth against her bottom lip.

When she nods, his fingers slide down to tip her chin up so that he can kiss her and then he’s pressing more firmly into her, rolling his hips into hers and she feels lost, swept along in the tide of his body moving in hers.

He’s so close to her. Not just that feeling inside of her, but the skin of his stomach brushing against hers, his breath hot and shaky against her face, his eyes near enough that she can see them lose their focus as he thrusts harder, hard enough that she feels her shoulders press down into the mattress.

He feels good against her, but not great and there’s no quivering heat, no flutter deep in her stomach, no coil of pleasure twisting through her body and the idea of him finishing before she does and them being faced with that situation, unscripted and uncertain as to what either of them would do outweighs any inclination to stay quiet and see if it gets better.

“It’s not-“ she gets out, smoothing her hands across his shoulder blades. She lifts her chin slightly, running her tongue over her lips. “Can we-“

“What would you like?”

“Just-“ she starts except that she doesn’t know because it’s hard to put into words and just having him there with his skin pressed to hers is enough to render her slightly useless.

“Satisfactory?” he asks as he draws her leg slightly higher on his back.

“Yeah,” she answers, rolling her hips up into his. It is better. Sort of. “Um, no.”

She grabs for his wrist, tugging at his hand until he’s gripping her knee and pressing it back towards her.

“Is that preferable?” he asks and how he can manage words that long is beyond her because pleasure is blanking out her thoughts in a way that makes what he’s saying hard to focus on.

“Yeah that’s-“ She presses her palm to the back of his hand, heat skittering across her fingers and up her arm at the contact.

Then he starts moving again and she hears a hard, harsh breath get pushed out of her lungs, leaving her gasping and pulling air in again.

“Can you simply tell me-“

“I’m not going to- to describe it.”

“Why?”

“I-“ she starts and then has to pull in another hard gasp, trying to catch her breath. But he’s still looking at her like it would only be logical to launch into some type of incredibly specific explanation about angles and vectors and pressure and she feels herself break into a broad grin, feels absolutely unable to keep it in.

“What is so amusing?” he asks and how he can speak like that she has no idea because her mind is hot and fuzzy and things like words feel really far away.

“C’mere,” she says and when she pulls him down to kiss he comes willingly.

It’s very nearly messy, their mouths eager and fervent, his teeth scraping over her lips, her tongue in his mouth, sliding wet and impatient against his.

Every time he pulls back and then pushes into her again, she can feel pleasure jolt through her and she tries to focus on it, tries to let it fill her mind. 

She presses her hips up into him everytime he thrusts forward, seeking more of it, grinding up and against him as best as she’s able with him holding her like he is, his fingers pressing into her thigh.

“Nyota?” she hears him ask.

“Just-“ she starts and then he shifts forward slightly on his next thrust and whatever she was about to say leaves her mouth in a startled moan. 

Her fingers hurt from digging into his back and she drops one hand down to his ass, his muscles constricting and lengthening again as he moves in her. It’s too much, the pleasure he’s stoking in her sitting like a deep, hot hook behind her navel and then he’s pushing her down into the mattress with his body, his hand falling from her leg to work underneath her, dragging her hips up against his.

She feels herself tense as her climax builds, clinging to him and letting him hold her like that, until the way he’s moving in her makes pleasure break over her and she can’t breathe through it, can only grab at him as heat courses across her and her blood rushes hot through her body, swamping over her.

When she has it in herself to open her eyes again, his face is pressed into her neck and his hips are still slowly pressing and rolling into hers, and she swears she can feel the echo of his own orgasm against her skin.

She hears her shaky, quivering inhale as he sits back from her. She doesn’t watch as he messes around with the condom and she starts to tell him not to when he draws the sheet over her since she’s about to leave, but it feels nice when he lays down again next to her. She’s sweaty and flushed, already overheated, but the warmth of his body is still comforting, and those inches between their shoulders and hips are few enough that she can still feel how close he is.

He’s quiet for a long time, staring up at the ceiling next to her, his chest still rising and falling rapidly as they both try to catch their breath.

“Did that alleviate some of your anxiety over the beginning of the semester?” he asks and she can’t help but laugh, raising both hands to cover her face.

“Why, you going to write up a detailed lab protocol of said scientific method if I say yes?”

“Perhaps,” he says and she swears she can hear a smile in his voice.

She can’t help but keep smiling herself, even after she drops her hands and feels him glance over at her.

“I can’t believe I have to go back to school so soon,” she finally admits, softly, like if she can say it quietly enough then it won’t be true. It’s easier to say that than to bring up the fact that no, doing this again isn’t going to fix anything or make it simpler between them. She can’t voice that now, not with sweat still beaded on her skin and not with the sound of his breathing only slowly evening out, nor does she want to. That’s all for later, for the future where she’s walking to class, seeing him around campus, referring to him as ‘sir’ and as ‘Commander’, not feeling the heat of his bare skin so near to hers.

She can tell he’s still looking at her, even though her focus is on the ceiling.

“I thought that perhaps you would be anticipating the summer coming to a close,” he says, his voice just as low as hers had been and she turns her head on the pillow to look over at him.

“It wasn’t all that bad of a summer,” she says, reaching out to bump the back of her knuckles against his arm. It wasn’t, or at least not completely. They’ll deal with the semester when it comes and for now, she’s not entirely upset to have been at his apartment all night, to still be there with him now. “Against all odds.”

“I am attempting to calculate the odds,” he finally explains when he’s been quiet for far too long.

She just laughs again and kicks him in the calf and his hand immediately falls to her knee to still her. He leaves it there, his fingers tracing over her skin. She can see the shape of his fingers moving beneath the sheet and she thinks about telling him to stop but she doesn’t.

“Well there was an eighty nine percent chance that I was never going to suggest this in the first place,” she starts and doesn’t bother to try to stop smiling. It’s a topic that banishes the tight lump that grows in her stomach whenever she thinks about the semester, that swell of disquiet that used to be reserved for having him in her life and is now fully focused on her classes and the term starting. “And probably higher than that that you were going to kick me out of your office.”

“I do not believe I ever considered actual bodily violence,” he says, squeezing her knee and very nearly smiling.

She laughs softly, shaking her head back and forth on the pillow so that her hair whispers against it. She feels great, loose and unwound and she finds that it’s harder to stop grinning than to just give into it.

“You wore your uniform,” she reminds him. “That first time we went to get tea.”

“Was that inappropriate?”

“I was pretty much ready to throw in the towel right then,” she admits.

“Throw it into what?” he asks, but he squeezes her knee again as he says it.

“Probably smack you with it,” she grins, rolling onto her side and propping her head on her hand.

“Is that becoming of a Starfleet cadet?”

“Is wearing your uniform becoming of a first date?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well now you know,” she says lightly, but can’t look at him while she says it, so instead she tugs at her hair tie and turns to put it on the bedside table behind her, her hair too tangled to be kept up any more. 

He does know now and whether he wore his uniform because he really wanted no part in getting tea with her that day or whether he really thought it was appropriate to dress like that on a date, whoever he takes out next will likely have the benefit of her instruction. 

She thinks about asking him if he’s going to start dating at some point, but that involves asking when he thinks what’s between them will be over and she doesn’t quite know how to phrase that, doesn’t have the words that would make that question sound right.

“Did you ever tell Puri about us?” she asks instead, running her fingers through her hair to loosen it as she turns back towards him. “What really happened?”

To her surprise, he reaches out and runs a lock through his fingers.

“No,” he says, twisting it this way and that. “I had thought I might but the situation became complex enough that relating it with any accuracy or degree of believability seemed…”

“Difficult?”

“Precisely.”

She looks at her hair twined between his fingers. She’s not always a huge fan of people touching it like that, but she finds that she doesn’t want to tell him to stop. It doesn’t feel worth it, not if she’s not going to see him like this again and besides, it feels nice to have him playing with her hair like that.

“Was it ok this morning?” she asks. It’s a personal question and none of her business and she asks it with her focus still on his fingers instead of looking at him. “With your parents?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

After a long moment, he finally untangles his fingers, smooths her hair back, then rises from the bed so that she immediately misses his warmth next to her.

She’s about to also get up, but he brings her a glass of water from the bathroom and she drains half of it in one long swallow, unaware of how thirsty she was. She tells herself to get up, to toss the sheet back and find her clothes, but instead she takes another, smaller sip, cradling the glass in her hands.

“This may be helpful,” he tells her as he hands her a padd and she has to set the glass down to take it. She flicks through the padd as he refills her glass, bringing it back along with a coaster to set on the bedside table next to her.

“This is from the acoustical engineering job?” she asks, scrolling back up to the top and beginning to read it more thoroughly. He just nods as he pulls open a drawer of his dresser and it’s hard to look away from his bare back, but she makes herself focus on the padd again. It’s a more detailed explanation of the work than what he had given her earlier and it helps to distract her from how he looks with the light falling softly over his skin.

She hears the shower turn on when she’s halfway through reading it and her mind is still blurry and muddled enough that she has to blink a few times, looking between the padd and the half-open door to his bathroom as she wonders if that’s a hint that she should get going.

And she should, since she’s already beginning to dread stepping out of his warm apartment into the cooler night air in order to drag herself back to her dorm. Staying any longer is only going to make it harder, but she’s not done reading yet.

She looks between the padd and the bathroom once more, then settles down into his pillows, telling herself that she’ll at least wait until he’s done before leaving, since it would be rude to not say goodbye.

But it takes him a while to shower and what he gave her is really long and overly complicated for a night when she just had a big meal after spending the afternoon working on her paper and she feels her eyes grow heavy. It’s not particularly great to feel like she can’t get through the padd, not with classes starting soon and she makes herself sit up a bit so that she won’t fall asleep. She’s used to working long into the night, forcing herself to stay awake even when it would be easier to roll over and shut her eyes. Then again, she’s not normally in a bed with such soft sheets, or in a room where the temperature is kept so high, or listening to the soft drone of a shower, or as loose and relaxed as she’s feeling, her limbs heavy and her body still flushed warm.

“M’reading that,” she tells him when she feels a gentle tug at the padd in her hands and realizes that she has to open her eyes to look up at him, unsure of when she closed them.

“Is that so.”

“I’m also going,” she mumbles into the pillow.

“That is abundantly clear. Should I bring you your shoes?”

She can’t get her mouth to work again, so she just nods.

“I have some questions about the job,” she yawns when she finally rouses herself enough to speak again.

“I greatly anticipate hearing them.”

“I think I don’t want to do so much computer stuff,” she says, unable to keep her eyes open while she says it.

“Computer stuff?” he echoes and hearing him repeat her words makes her smile, except that it’s hard to do so when she yawns again.

She tries to push herself up and she tries to tell him that she’s too hot when he pulls the sheet up around her shoulders and she tries to find it in herself to tell him to turn the lights on instead of how he shuts off the bathroom light, which makes the room only darker. And she will, except that she can feel the bed dip under his weight and it seems unfair to ask him to brighten the room if he’s going to sleep, and it feels too hard to ask him to move over when she burrows further into the pillow only to find how close his shoulder is.

“You are sleeping in the middle of the bed,” he informs her, his voice a soft whisper.

“M’going,” she whispers back, her nose bumping against his arm when she shifts deeper into the bed.

“Now?”

Since she just told him that she’s leaving, she doesn’t answer, and when her hand closes over his forearm, she doesn’t move it and later, when she wakes enough to kick the blankets off, she doesn’t roll further away from him because it’s just the right temperature, lying there next to his bare body with the heat of his skin warming her.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you thank you to everyone who saw my tumblr post about the incredibly atrocious weather we’ve been having and the slowdown it caused with this story. All your warm wishes were lovely to receive and I truly appreciate the support. The good news is that after surviving four blizzards in three weeks, life is back on track and I’m slightly less buried under snow, which means I’ve had time to write again! Yay! And as ever, thank you to albinofrog for the beta! The rest of the mistakes are mine and mine alone!

“Done,” Nyota says, dropping the padd on the table in front of Spock with a clatter. She pulls out the chair across from him and sinks into it, finding that she can’t quite stop smiling. “Also, hi.”

“Hello. You have completed your paper?”

He’s looking down at her padd and with his attention turned away it gives her a moment to study him, the dark fan of his eyelashes, the way the collar of his instructor’s uniform lays against his throat, how the soft evening light streaming through the window of the café falls over him, and the full cup of tea that suggests he hasn’t been waiting for her for very long.

“I did,” she says as she looks away from him, since she doesn’t need to be watching him like that. It’s been a battle all week to stop thinking about how his body felt against hers, how he moved in her, how he kisses and she’s not going to give into the urge to start letting those thoughts rush back now, not sitting across from him during a meeting about work. “It’s done and it’s Friday and now I have all weekend and Monday and Tuesday off before classes start.”

“An actual vacation?” he asks, picking up her padd and she doesn’t let herself look at how big his hands seem as he holds it and she doesn’t let herself remember what it’s like when he touches her.

“Guess I’ll have to figure out what to do with myself,” she tells him, settling back into her chair instead of watching his long fingers as he begins to scroll through her paper. They didn’t have to meet in person to do this, but she didn’t have a lot going on and, moreover, she didn’t think she could wait to hear what he thought of her work, sitting in her room and waiting for him to message her. And maybe they shouldn’t have come here, maybe should have started to edge back towards seeing each other in a more professional space since her paper is done and the arrangement between them is starting to ebb, but he hadn’t exactly argued about getting together tonight. “At least until I get your comments back.”

“Are you that eager to fill your time?”

“No,” she says, folding her arms on the table and leaning over it slightly, towards him. “Yes. Maybe.”

She’s not that eager, not really, since the beginning of the term used to seem so far away and now it’s bearing down on her, reminding her of early mornings, late nights, and meals grabbed on the go, not these long evenings like she’s enjoying now, the freedom to make what she will of her night. Wanting to persist in these summer months wasn’t something she ever exactly expected, not with how strange it’s been to have spent it with Spock, but the excitement about wanting to finish up her paper aside, she still wants to hold on to as much of summer as she can, reach out and grab it with both hands before she finds herself caught up in the grind of the semester. 

“Do you have other plans for the weekend?” he asks.

“No, not really. Gaila wants to go out.”

“Where?”

“Just out.”

“That is not a specific answer.”

“Gaila is not one to make specific plans.”

She glances up at the counter and the menu of drinks she could get for herself, then at his mug, and then reaches out to grab the handle and draw it towards her. She takes a long sip, giving him a slight grin when he looks at her, then at the cup, and then back at her again.

“Are you intending to join her?”

“Maybe,” she shrugs, taking another sip of his tea. She likes going dancing and it’ll probably be her last chance for a while, but this is nice too, sitting in the quiet of the café and the idea of music pounding into her and the tipsy, spinning of so many drinks seems like a lot, too much of a disconnect from the scent of Spock’s tea and the peace and calm of the current moment.

“You doing anything in particular over the weekend?” she asks as she wraps her fingers around his mug, the warmth seeping into her hand.

“Apparently composing feedback for you as quickly as possible,” he says. He glances up from the padd at her, and the way the light falls across his face and brings out the brown in his eyes as he quirks that eyebrow at her makes something in her chest catch.

“You better be,” she tells him, setting his mug back down and sliding it back across the table to him, then folding her hands in her lap.

He looks like he’s about to say something else, still looking at her with one hand on her padd and his eyes locked on hers when a chair is suddenly pulled up next to them and Taele sits in it, staring at each of them in turn.

“I have found you,” she says. “You are having tea. Again. You should consider other options for social interaction in public.”

“More accurately, the Cadet is consuming my tea,” Spock corrects and Nyota blinks and pulls her attention away from him, not aware of when she started staring at him like that again.

Taele slowly looks from Nyota, down to the cup, and then up at Spock before she leans towards him over the table. “Commander, I have come to collect the specifications I requested. Additionally, you should have procured the Cadet her own beverage. That was a gross oversight on your part.”

Nyota tries very hard to not smile at the way Spock opens his mouth to answer, then shuts it and reaches into his bag.

“The latest data from Chief Engineer Olson,” he says as he hands a set of filmplasts to Taele.

“I do not approve of him.”

“You have intimated as much.”

“He is solitary.”

“I am not in the habit of discussing my colleague’s personal lives,” Spock tells her, which just makes Taele shake her head.

“You should encourage him to engage in a relationship.”

“Yeah, you should totally give him some advice, Spock,” Nyota tells him, giving him a grin when he just looks at her. She can’t help but smile at the thought, since he might not be all that bad at dispensing dating advice at this point and there’s a chance he could write a very logical, very precise primer on how to date human women.

“Tea,” Taele says and Spock finally looks away from Nyota.

“Pardon?”

“You are required to either replace your own drink or procure one for the Cadet.”

“No.”

“We can share,” Nyota offers, grabbing for Spock’s mug again and hiding her smile behind it as she takes another sip. Maybe he’s not totally ready to be dishing out advice, not quite yet.

Taele looks between them for a long moment, then at the mug in Nyota’s hands.

“Acceptable,” she finally states with an air of finality. 

“Do you need to go up to the ship?” Nyota asks Spock. She hasn’t seen him since leaving his apartment the other morning and the idea that he might be busy with Taele all night is slightly jarring when she thought that they’d be going over her paper instead.

“I do not require further assistance,” Taele says. “Good evening to you both.”

“Night,” Nyota says, giving her a small wave as they both watch her go. “Well. She was down right pleasant.”

“That is a gross overstatement.”

“You just don’t like that she pointed out that you didn’t get me any tea,” Nyota says and can’t help but grin at him again when he raises that eyebrow of his but doesn’t otherwise look up from her padd.

She hands his mug back to him as she stands and when he reaches out for it, their fingers brush, just lightly.

“You-“ she starts, working her thumb over the tips of her index and middle finger, which are still tingling. “You want anything else?”

“Not at this juncture.”

She leaves him reading her padd while so goes up to the counter to order. It takes them a while to get her chai ready, which she spends staring at the pastry case, wondering how Spock would react if she got him to have some chocolate and if he would ever go for it.

She could ask him and he might answer and he might not, and she’ll either get that quiet reserve of his, or it might be one of those moments when a little fact about his life slips out, like it does now and again. She’s getting used to that, learning about him in fits and starts and when she glances over at him, the sight of him sitting there, ramrod straight and focused on her writing like there’s nobody and nothing else in the room is familiar to her, even though it was never supposed to be.

“Is it good?” she asks when she joins him again, setting her tea on the table and trying to peer at her padd enough to see how far he’s read.

“It should be apparent that as I have not yet finished, I cannot pass judgment upon it.”

“Is the beginning good?”

“’Good’ is an illogical way to evaluate a paper. So far your argument is cogent and well supported.”

“Thanks,” she says, and finds that she’s smiling. She got excellent feedback from him when she was his student, but hearing that in regards to her paper after working on it all summer is different, much more meaningful. “And see, you totally do know what to say to a girl. I think I’m blushing.”

“Truly?”

“No,” she says, carefully blowing on her tea to cool it.

She wraps her hands around her mug, sipping from it slowly as he reads. She tells herself not to, but she can’t help but keep watching him, letting her eyes trace over the way his hands look on the padd and how rapidly his eyes move. She promised herself that she wasn’t going to think about him like that, how it feels when his hands touch her or the way his mouth moves over the skin of her neck, and she isn’t. She’s just looking and any moment now she’ll find something else to focus on.

He’s silent as he reads her work, which is fine since it’s a quiet evening in the café, still and peaceful and besides a handful of other couples, most of the tables are empty. Two Trills are absorbed in books they brought with them and a young Bajoran couple are having a quiet conversation, and two humans who Nyota is pretty sure work as flight instructors at the Academy are sharing a scone and a mug of coffee.

She thinks about taking out her comm and flicking through it to see if Gaila texted her, or maybe her other padd that she brought since she can look through course listings again while she waits for him to finish reading, but instead she just sits there, enjoying the softness of the early evening, the warmth of her tea, and the satisfaction of having finished her paper. It leaves a happy glow in her, warming her stomach and chest and for the first time in weeks and maybe all summer she feels absolutely, utterly relaxed and she can’t help but smile again, this time at the sight of Spock reading her completed paper, grinning at how gratifying that is.

“I apologize that I did not foresee your beverage requirements,” he says softly, and when she glances over at him again he’s not looking up at her, his attention still on the padd.

“Not a big deal,” she assures him. “But you’ll probably have to live with the knowledge of the Ambassador’s disappointment in you.”

“I believe that I will be able to overcome such circumstances.”

“Hmm, I hope so,” she murmurs as she takes another sip of her tea.

He’s quiet again for long enough that her mug is nearly empty when he finally glances up. It’s only for a second, just enough that his eyes catch her before he’s looking down again.

“Well done,” he says as he sets her padd down and she can’t help the smile that spreads across her face.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

She runs her teeth over her bottom lip and they’re in a café and she doesn’t need to be grinning like that and she’s probably too happy about it and it’s not actually a big deal since she knows it’s a good paper. But it’s nice hearing it from him and there’s a fluttering lightness in her chest from having it done, and from having him say that about her work.

“Thanks,” she says, ducking her head towards her mug and quickly raising it to take a sip.

“It is the truth.”

“No, I meant for-“ She waves towards the padd. “All summer. Helping me with it.”

There’s a certain finality in saying that, a feeling of all of this beginning to draw to a close, but it’s also true. He was, despite everything, more than helpful in her writing her paper.

“It is not yet finished as there are sections that could stand to be improved.”

“Say ‘you’re welcome’,” she instructs, setting her mug back down. He just sits there, silent, and she blows out a long breath. No matter how good of an advisor he is, he’s also exhasperating. “Never mind.”

“I will compose my comments this evening and send them to you,” he says as he hands her padd back to her.

“Are you going?” she asks, because she thought they were going to sit there for longer. He hasn’t moved yet, but he’s done with his tea and she’s almost done with hers and he apparently has what he needs in order to give her feedback.

Which is fine. A bit abrupt maybe, but fine if he has other things he needs to get to and his schedule shouldn’t matter to her. 

“Can I-“ she starts, reaching out to turn her mug this way and that and trying to keep herself from asking what she wants to, but it’s a losing battle. She wasn’t going to request this, but now that she has him there and if he really read her paper so fast, it’s probably logical to ask his help on this, or something like that. “I filled out the application for the Advanced Morphology position. Would you mind… could you read it over?”

And maybe he wasn’t going to leave, even if he did finish her paper and his tea since he holds his hand out for the padd.

“You should place a greater emphasis on the marks you achieved on your midterm examination,” he tells her after he’s finished scanning it. “As well as your scores in Phonological Theory.”

“You know my scores in Phonological Theory?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you do,” she sighs, sitting back in her chair. “And…”

“And?” he prompts when she hasn’t finished her thought and has just been staring at him across the table, a small knot of worry starting to grow in her stomach.

She can ask Professor Engstrom or Lieutenant Commander Haught or even Lieutenant Irani. They’d be the simpler choice since she didn’t sleep with any of them since she doesn’t exactly go around sleeping with professors. Everything with seems Spock complicated now and trying to remember that he’s a senior officer – which she knows – and is also the person whose bed she woke up in the other morning is dissonant, jarring, like after a summer away from the Xenolinguistics Department he doesn’t quite fit back into the role of instructor and professor and Commander, not with him sitting there with his empty cup of tea and the way he’s watching her with his head tipped to the side and his focus on her like that, steady and intent.

Of course, none of the other professors ever got the chance to come to know her so well, because he finally just asks, “Would you like a recommendation?”

“Yes,” she says before she can second-guess herself. That was their deal, that it wouldn’t get weird or strange or uncomfortable, no matter what happened between them, that time spent in his bed together that still makes her feel a little flushed whenever she thinks about it. She needs references for the job and she’s sure he’s the logical choice – the professor she took the same course with and her most recent advisor. He just also happens to be the most recent man she slept with and she happened to have met his parents and spent the entire summer with him and in all likelihood, the entire rest of the department is at some point going to hear that they were seeing each other. But that just has to be ok and maybe this is the first step towards that. “Is that… is that alright?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.”

And then it’s quiet between them, a silence descending as he hands her padd back and she carefully tucks it into her bag. His mug of tea is empty and he’s read her paper and it’s Friday night and she should probably get going. Gaila had been wanting to go out and Nyota could call her and see if she’s left yet, if she’s on her way to some bar or club with any of their friends who have returned to campus already. It’s still early, Nyota could get back to their dorm, change and be out to meet them before the evening really gets underway.

“Really, no plans tonight?” she asks Spock and instead of getting her comm out, she picks up her tea again, taking a small sip from what’s left.

“Puri invited us to dinner.”

She sets her tea down with a slight clink against the table. “Did he.”

“I said that he did.”

“For tonight?”

“Yes.”

Spock carefully straightens her padd so that it’s lined up neatly with the edge of the table. “I will inform him that you are preoccupied at an unspecified location.”

“You’re going to go, then?”

“I had intended to compose my feedback on your paper.”

“Right now?”

“Did you not want it as soon as possible?”

She does, of course. She can’t really imagine having all weekend free with nothing to work on, no matter that so many unoccupied days is exactly what she tends to crave in the middle of the semester. But the sooner he gets back to her, the sooner she can make the edits and be done with her paper, choose a journal to submit it to and have it off her to-do list. They can start to be done with all of this, and everything that’s between them will be in their past which will be fine. Great. What she’s been waiting for for months now.

“Yes,” she answers and he nods and reaches for his bag and is starting to stand up when she can’t help but put out a hand to stop him. “You should go to dinner with them.”

“Why?” he asks and she thinks he might continue to rise from his chair, but he settles back into it.

“The semester’s going to start and they want to have dinner with you, they’ve wanted to all summer.”

“We ate an evening meal together three times, once at Jardinière and twice in Mojave.”

“Fine. They want to have you over for dinner,” she corrects.

“More specifically, they want to have both of us over for dinner.”

“I keep waiting for the day you stop driving me nuts but that just hasn’t happened yet,” she says, leaning her elbows on the table and giving him a hard look.

“I trust you will inform me when this long anticipated event occurs.”

She huffs out a quiet laugh, sitting back in her chair again and watching him as his grip on his bag slowly relaxes. He’s exasperating. She should go, meet up with her friends and leave him to his night alone in his apartment, going over her paper and probably a half a dozen other projects if that’s really what he wants to do with his time.

“I would not wish to occupy any more of your remaining summer recess,” he says softly, interrupting her envisioning him alone in his living room at his desk, a picture she never needed to be so clear in her mind as she never needed to be in his apartment, but she was.

“You’re not,” she tells him. She hasn’t really seen him lately, not since she woke up the other morning and ok, maybe that was a little strange that she slept there again but it had been fine, she thought. They had walked back to campus together, where she had headed off to her dorm to change and he had gone to his office and she had promised herself that she wouldn’t think about him again, not tangled together on his sheets, the firm stroke of him in her, the way the muscles of his back shifted under her hands. And she had been successful in that. Mostly. 

She looks away from him, sure that he can somehow tell what she’s thinking, and tells herself to stand up, grab her comm and call Gaila. For once, and for the first and only time until the semester ends, she has no work, nothing to do until Spock has finished commenting on her paper, and that feels amazing in a way that makes her entire body seem lighter, makes the idea of the evening and the next day and the day after stretch out in front of her like a happy, joyous present. 

So she should get going, find her friends and leave Spock to his night alone if that’s what he wants to spend his time doing, and they’ll be that much closer to finishing her paper, one half of this arrangement between them, but instead she says, “I’ll go. If you want. If that makes a difference.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” she echoes. “That’s not an answer.”

“It was not a question.“

“God, yes or no, Spock,” she sighs. 

“Is it your preference?”

She lifts one shoulder in a light shrug. She’s free all night and dinner won’t take so long that she can’t meet up with Gaila later. Puri is always fun to be around and she’s come to rather enjoy Stoyer’s company. And Spock is… Spock, who doesn’t want to take up her time if that’s not what she wants and who is planning to spend his entire Friday night working on her paper by himself in his apartment. 

She shouldn’t go. They should stop doing this and instead start to untangle their lives and with her paper done, that’s all the more reason to begin to back away from each other, but rather than explaining that to him, she says, “Sure.”

“That is not a logical answer to the question I posed.”

“Perhaps it is.”

She thinks that he’s going to keep arguing about it and decides that if he does, she’s going to give up and go tell Gaila she’s free all night, because she really doesn’t need to be sitting here disagreeing over how they’re going to spend their Friday, but instead of debating it further, he pulls out his comm.

Puri’s delight is palpable, so that by the time Spock’s done with his call, Nyota finds herself also smiling.

“Sounds delicious,” she grins at Spock. He doesn’t seem like the type to enjoy Andorian Tex-Mex but that’s apparently what’s on the menu. “But if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.”

“I do not understand.”

“We’re getting ingredients for guacamole,” she says, standing and pushing her chair in. “C’mon, I bet the grocery store’s still open.”

Spock has, apparently, never selected avocados before and she takes the two he’s holding and sets them back in the bin, shaking her head at him.

“No, stop, you’re doing it wrong,” she says, nudging him slightly to the side with her hip.

“Is there perhaps a training class I could attend?”

“You obviously need one,” she tells him, elbowing him further away from the bin.

“These would be easier replicated if it is so difficult to procure them at the height of freshness.”

“Nah, they get all grainy when you replicate them,” she says. He’s still standing close to her and she tells herself to ignore the heat of his body, the way her arm brushes against his again, and how it makes the back of her neck tingle, just having him there right next to her.

“And yet you have needed to search their entire inventory to select ones which are up to your standards.”

“All the hard work will be worth it,” she promises, then holds out the two she’s found so far until he takes them from her.

“Would a shopping basket aid your endeavor?”

“It’s our endeavor and no, just hold those.”

“It is illogical to-“

“It is illogical to just stand there. Go find some garlic,” she instructs and takes a deep breath when he finally walks away, wishing it weren’t quite so shaky.

“Anything else for you two?” the cashier asks when the get to the front. Nyota can tell why she’d ask, since Spock is holding a red onion and eyeing it like it’s a new lab specimen, one he’s not entirely sure he should be touching without a bio containment procedure in place.

“Hmm?” Nyota asks, tearing her eyes away from him.

“You and your boyfriend? Anything else today?”

“He’s not my…” she starts, and then just lets out a long breath because it’s just too hard to explain. “No, but thank you.”

“Stop,” she tells him when he finally hands the onion to the cashier and reaches for his wallet. “You’re not paying for this.”

“Is that instruction a precursor to my consumption of guacamole?”

She shouldn’t touch him since she’s trying to not make a habit of it, trying to will herself to forget what his body feels like under her hands, but she rubs her palm across his shoulder blade anyway. “What an impeccably logical deduction.”

“Thank you,” he says as she pulls out her own wallet.

Puri and Stoyer’s house is old and charming, set back on a tiny street near where Nyota goes jogging sometimes, a row of old Victorians that she’s always wondered about since they tend to catch her eye, their bright and cheery colors standing out against the San Francisco fog. Inside it’s all blonde wood and a light and open space, decorated here and there with Andorian weapons that Nyota wants to get a look at except that she’s too busy accepting a hug and a glass of wine from Stoyer.

“Excellent work, Cadet, getting the Commander out here tonight,” Stoyer says with the type of crisp efficiency Nyota’s heard from her in the Academy assembly hall or around campus.

“Thank you, sir,” she says with a grin, letting Stoyer’s excitement buoy her farther into the house. It’s strange to be there, with Spock standing next to her when by now she should be feeling the thumping beat of music and have a sweaty drink in her hand, not a glass of pinot noir, but this is nice too. Different. Slightly odd, like stepping into someone else’s life, someone who Spock brings to dinner at the house of senior officers. 

Except that it’s just Spock, who’s already following Puri towards the kitchen and it’s just Stoyer, who gives her another warm smile and offers her a tour.

“It’s good, trust me,” Nyota says, later, when they’ve settled into chairs around the table. Puri’s serving dinner onto their plates and Stoyer’s opening another bottle of wine and Nyota takes the chance to scoop out some guacamole for Spock before he can protest. “It’s so, so good.”

“It contains avocado.”

“Obviously.”

“And onion.”

“And tomato and cilantro.”

“I do not prefer the taste of cilantro.”

“Eat it,” she tells him firmly.

“You’ve lived on Earth how long and haven’t tried it?” Stoyer asks, passing Nyota a bowl full of tortilla chips.

Spock looks between them and the guacamole and really, Nyota could be out with friends but instead she pushes the plate a little closer to him, and closer still until he finally reaches for a chip.

“It is not unpleasant,” Spock finally admits, then takes a second bite, wiping his hand on his napkin each time he touches a chip. 

“I’m glad you two could come tonight, before the semester starts,” Stoyer says as she reaches for her wine. “It always seems like summer goes by so fast.”

“It always sneaks up on me,” Nyota agrees, though admittedly a glass of wine and having Spock there next to her examining his fajita makes classes seem really far away.

“There’s no meat in yours,” Puri assures him as Spock pokes at his dinner with his fork.

“That is a substantial amount of cheese.”

“Do you two just eat plan bread for most meals together?” Puri says as he cuts into his own food, looking like he wants to smile at Spock’s hesitancy.

“He’s always been like this?” Nyota asks, watching as Spock cuts a tiny pieces off, which is mostly the end of the tortilla where the enchilada sauce and cheese on the fajitas haven’t quite spread.

“We nearly starved him at our wedding,” Stoyer says. “Of course, it was a traditional Andorian ceremony and we pretty much only served meat. Spock was fighting over the only salad with my sister.”

“We were not fighting.”

“You two were dividing it down to the last leaf,” Puri corrects. “I heard about it from my delightful, wonderful and enchanting new mother in law for the next year.”

“She was freezing cold,” Stoyer says. “And add on some more adjectives if you’re going to talk about my mom.”

“Pleasant. Marvelous. Kind. Help me out, Uhura.”

“Winsome?” she suggests.

“Winsome,” Puri confirms.

“Perhaps you should have considered heating the room we were in,” Spock says as he continues to carefully deconstruct his dinner.

“Heating? Spock, my grandmother nearly drove me through with a spear because of how hot it was. I thought I was going to be served on a platter next to the tenderloin.”

“Sounds like a lovely event,” Nyota grins.

“And speaking of families,” Puri says, propping his elbows on the table and his chin in his upturned palms. He smiles, looking between them. “How was dinner with the parents?”

“Doctor,” Spock says severely.

“I’m just curious,” Puri says. “That’s what happens when you don’t provide any details, Spock, you just casually mention that someone met someone else’s parents. Arlene wants to know, too.”

“I do not,” Stoyer says quickly, then winces. “Ok, a little bit.”

“It was fine,” Nyota says, then realizes that she doesn’t really know. She thought it was fine. A little intense maybe, but not stranger than anything else over the summer. Maybe it wasn’t, though, maybe Spock thought it hadn’t gone well or maybe his parents said something in the days since then, or maybe she had made some misstep that he hadn’t thought to inform her of, since why would he – she’s never going to see them again. 

And either way, it shouldn’t matter to her. She wasn’t supposed to ever meet them and wasn’t supposed to be at Spock’s apartment at all, not like that, not sleeping there with his warm body next to hers, the sheets rumpled and tangled and damp with sweat.

She clears her throat and reaches for her wineglass again.

“Satisfactory,” Spock says and she can’t help but smile, first at her plate and then at him. She nudges her arm into his, too, until he looks at her.

“Really?” she asks, leaving her elbow near his. “Such rave reviews.”

“Well done, Uhura, that’s a lot better than ‘acceptable,’” Puri says.

“So much better than just acceptable,” Nyota agrees, which makes Puri nod, more gravely this time even though he’s obviously struggling not to smile.

“They’re nice, right?” Stoyer asks as she reaches for the bowl of guacamole.

“They were really nice,” Nyota confirms. Quiet and reserved, but that’s hardly a surprise after knowing Spock all summer. Not that it matters, she tells herself again as she turns back to her meal, drawing her arm from next to Spock’s so that she can cut into her food.

After dinner, Stoyer fills up their wine glasses again and leads Nyota into the living room with the type of brisk firmness Nyota’s seen her use with visiting dignitaries and Federation officials at the Academy.

But they’re not at the Academy, they’re in Stoyer’s house and just being there is still making Nyota’s head spin a bit, and even more so when Stoyer sits her down on the couch and pulls out a holo emitter.

“Oh my God,” Nyota says, leaning forward. “Is this your wedding? You look amazing.”

“I look like a popsicle,” Stoyer corrects, flicking to another picture and then another. “Never get married on an ice planet.”

“Is Spock wearing six or seven layers of wool under his dress uniform?” Nyota asks, grinning when a picture of him pops up. He’s not, obviously, since he looks as slim as ever and much younger, like he hadn’t quite grown out of the gangly teenager she can very nearly tell he was. “This is right after he and Puri graduated?”

“A couple weeks later,” Stoyer confirms. “We just didn’t want to wait.”

“That looks like it was so much fun,” Nyota says as Stoyer flicks through a half dozen more before she abruptly pauses. 

“Sorry,” Stoyer says and goes to turn the album off, but Nyota puts out her hand to stop her, unable to stop staring at the woman standing next to Spock.

“Is that-“ she starts to ask, then stops because she knows. What other Vulcan woman would he have brought and who else would have elicited such a response from Stoyer.

“I forgot that was in there,” Stoyer says quickly, moving like she’s going to shut it off again, though she doesn’t when Nyota shakes her head.

She shouldn’t look at it, should probably back away from peeking into Spock’s past like this but instead she leans forward, studying it. In the picture, T’Pring is absolutely gorgeous, tall and slender and frankly stunning, standing there a careful foot or so from Spock’s side. And Nyota shouldn’t know that – what T’Pring looks like or how Spock held himself when he was standing with her, and she definitely shouldn’t be as curious as she is, thirsty to learn details that Spock may never share with her.

Won’t share, because Nyota shouldn’t even really be there tonight, at dinner at his friends’ house, spending a Friday evening with him. They shouldn’t have even met up tonight since she should have just sent him her paper, but they did.

“What’s she like?” Nyota asks, even though she tells herself not to.

“You know, that’s the only time I met her and it was my wedding so it was all kind of a blur,” Stoyer says and when she moves again to shut off the holo emitter, this time Nyota lets her. 

“Sure.”

Stoyer rubs her fingers over the emitter, brushing away a fleck of dust.

“Not…” Stoyer starts, then glances back towards the kitchen. “Not like you, not at all.”

And it doesn’t matter. Not how softly Stoyer says it or the hard knot in Nyota’s stomach that is half hurt for Spock and is half an edgy tautness at hearing that from Stoyer.

Stoyer’s quiet as she puts everything away. Nyota hasn’t moved yet, her mind still caught on what she just saw, now able to more clearly imagine what T’Pring is like. Or looks like, at least. Someone who was once a total mystery to her and who is now less of an enigma.

“Spock’s different, too,” Stoyer adds.

“Sorry, what?” she asks, glancing up at Stoyer and trying to take her mind off the picture, how stiff Spock looked.

“Now, I mean. He’s not like how he was.” Stoyer smiles at her and reaches over to squeeze her hand. “In a good way.”

Puri and Spock are just putting away the last of the dishes when they return to the kitchen. Nyota can’t help but stare at Spock, her attention on him and how looks older now, different than in the picture and of course he does since that was years ago, a life for him that nearly doesn’t exist anymore, back when he was a newly commissioned officer who was engaged to a woman picked out for him when he was a child, when his life was on a completely different trajectory than it is now.

“Are you sufficiently caught up to speed on our wedding?” Puri asks, giving Nyota a grin and she has to work to pull her attention away from Spock to focus on the question.

“It was beautiful.”

“It was hot,” Puri says, crossing over to his wife and wrapping his arms around her shoulders.

“It was freezing cold,” Stoyer corrects as she lays her head against his chest.

Spock doesn’t say anything and he isn’t really looking at her. She hesitates, debating, then crosses over to him, slipping her arm back behind him so that she can rest of her hand over his waist, her thumb moving back and forth over the gray fabric of his uniform, which is softer than she expected it would be.

She starts to drop her hand but he leans very slightly into her touch and she ends up leaving it there.

When they step outside after saying their goodbyes, the summer night air is still warm, carrying only the slightest hint that fall might be around the corner. It’s also darker than Nyota was expecting it to be, that time of year when the sun starts to set earlier even though she’s not ready for that to be the case, not quite yet.

“Are you pleased to be done with your paper?” Spock asks as they start down the sidewalk.

“Yeah, until you pick it apart like you did with your dinner.”

“There are not a substantive amount of corrections to be made.”

“Good,” she says and it’s not the first time tonight that he’s complimented her work and she really shouldn’t care so much, but it still feels nice to hear after an entire summer working on it. “And yes, it’s great to have that over with.”

“Are you still intending to meet your friends tonight?” he asks.

“Maybe.”

“And tomorrow evening?” he asks and she glances up at him, slightly surprised by his questions.

“I don’t really know.” She tugs her jacket a little tighter around herself, thinking that it’s not as warm out as she initially thought it was. Spock feels warm, walking next to her, and she wishes she were a bit closer to him so that instead of just their arms brushing together, she could steal a bit of his body heat. “Why?”

“I was simply curious as to whether you were planning to celebrate the completion of your paper.”

“Oh maybe,” she says. “I guess I hadn’t really thought of doing that.”

She could, though. Gaila would love it and it’d be nice to stop and pause and take stock of the moment, when she is used to simply wrapping up a project and moving on to the next.

He glances down at her and there’s something in the way he’s looking at her that makes her stare back at him, his attention so focused and so intense that she feels like all she can do is let herself be caught up in his gaze. He stops walking and she does too, turning towards him as he draws in a breath.

“Would you perhaps like to-“

“Spock!”

She pulls her attention away from him, listening so hard for what he was about to say that it takes her a second to turn to see Puri jogging down the block towards them.

“Doctor?”

“Spock, answer your comm!” Puri calls and Spock pulls it out and flips it open right as it lights up with an incoming call.

“Excellent work, Commander,” Pike says without bothering with a greeting. “The crystals just arrived, the Ambassador is heading back to Saiph Prime as we speak, and as soon as we can get everyone ready, we have clearance to take our girl out for a spin!”

Puri’s laughing, one blue hand on Spock’s shoulder, who looks like he’s still processing what Pike just said.

“Space trials, Spock! We finally get to see what she can do!”

“I see,” Spock says, his eyes darting back and forth between his comm and Puri.

“Is that Puri? Puri, double check that we’re fully stocked for medical supplies and Spock, before you come I need to you to swing by HQ tonight and get our final flight course approval signed. We’re scheduled to depart Spacedock at 0930 so you two get packed.”

“Yes sir,” Puri says around a grin, his antenna’s sticking straight up.

“Yes sir,” Spock repeats, snapping his comm closed and trading what might just be a smile of his own with Puri. It’s just the corner of his mouth curling up and she wants to see more of that, to study it but it immediately fades when he turns to look at her.

“That’s great,” she says quickly. It’s wonderful. Her paper is done. Not published yet, not by a long shot, but written and Taele approved the distribution of the crystals and it’s perfect. Amazing. Incredible. 

“You ok?” Puri asks her and she makes herself nod. She’s free all weekend, has the entire evening to herself, and now doesn't have to do this with Spock any more, any of this, everything that’s been difficult and frustrating and has weighed her down all summer. Which doesn’t really explain why it’s now that she feels a heavy knot sink into her stomach, when everything they worked for is right there in front of them.

“Yeah, I’m…” She feels like the world just shifted around her, everything that was firm and solid is now unsteady and she thinks about stepping closer to Spock but doesn’t. She’s fine. It’s just all a little abrupt and they were in the middle of a conversation and this was always going to end so she shouldn’t care how it happens. Now is no different than in a few days or weeks. Better, even, since classes are going to start and now she won’t have to think about juggling everything. Her paper will be done and what she’s doing with Spock will be over. Is over. Ended in a comm call and Puri’s excited shout down the street.

She reaches out and touches Spock, her fingers pressed to the hard heat of his arm, her hand curling around him, digging into the fabric of his jacket.

She makes herself smile. “I’m excited for you two.”

She slowly pulls her hand back, letting it drop from his sleeve so that she can grab her own wrist and tighten her fingers over it, unable to quite look at him and trying keep the smile on her face that keeps threatening to falter.


	21. Chapter 21

“Have a good start of the semester, Uhura. Gotta go say goodbye to the wife,” Puri says with a smile and a wave, already halfway back up the street before either she or Spock can say a proper farewell.

It’s quiet between them, a silence hanging in the air until she turns from watching Puri jog back to his house to look up at Spock.

“I’ll, uh, no rush on those comments,” she tells him. She thinks about touching him again but doesn’t. “It seems like you’ll be busy.”

“I will send them as soon as possible.”

“Oh, ok, good. Thank you.”

There’s a lot of distance between them that wasn’t there before. She’s not sure if she moved away or if he did but it’s there, an expanse of sidewalk and warm night air, an arm’s length that she’d need to reach across if reaching across it was something that she was going to do.

He just watches her for a long moment and she knows she’s staring at him too, but she feels like the moment she looks away suddenly that will be it, everything that was anything between them dissipating in the space of a few moments on the sidewalk, their summer together punctured by the news that everything actually worked out and they don’t have to do this anymore.

“Nyota, I-“

“I’m sure you’re-“

They both fall silent again, and she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear for something to do with her hands. They feel heavy and clumsy and she should really just go. Let this be, let it slip away into her past and the sooner she walks away from him, the sooner that can happen.

“You probably have to go pack,” she makes herself say. “Get everything ready.”

“I do.” He glances behind him, in the direction of HQ. It’s the opposite direction from their walk back to the Academy. It’s fine. Convenient, really, that they were at Stoyer and Puri’s since Spock is that much closer to Headquarters and he needs to go by there anyway.

She tells herself to take a step back but doesn’t.

“It’s funny that the Ambassador’s gone,” she says instead.

“Is it truly?”

She wants to smile at that, wants to be able to feel the humor because no, it isn’t funny, not literally but she mostly just feels a little numb.

“Well enjoy the trip,” she tells him, taking a step back from him. She tells herself to take another one but her legs aren’t really listening to her so that’s as far as she gets.

She clears her throat, gives him a small wave and presses her lips together since she doesn’t trust herself otherwise to not just keep standing there talking to him. She doesn’t really trust herself to not touch him either and she forces herself to turn, to walk away down the street, trying not to listen to the voice in her that tells her to stay and talk to him more, like they can slip back into the sunny, warm weeks they spent together.

“I have your padd,” he says and he’s suddenly right beside her, close enough that she has to tilt her chin up to look at him. She doesn’t know how he got there, how he appeared next to her without her noticing but everything seems a bit far away, like she’s looking at the world through a wavy pane of glass.

“My padd?” she hears herself ask. He’s so close. She’s staring up at him and somewhere along the line she stopped walking and that’s ok because their arms are brushing together with how near he’s standing.

“The dictionary.”

“What dictionary?”

“That you checked out from the library.”

“I checked out when?” she asks.

“At the beginning of the summer.”

“I did?” she asks and as the words leave her mouth she raises her fingers to press to her forehead, remembering the Saphian dictionary she had given him back when he had been cool towards her, aloof and rather forbidding. Worrying about things like returning padds and getting everything all sorted out for the beginning of the semester seems so far away, like it’s happening to a friend or it’s in a movie she’s watching. She tries to get herself to focus on it, on practicalities like that instead of him standing right there. “It’s due soon, isn’t it?”

“I had thought to return it to the library for you when the semester begins but I do not know if I will be back on Earth.”

“You won’t be back?” she asks, dropping her hand to stare up at him.

“I do not know.”

“But you’re teaching,” she tells him.

“My primary assignment is to the Enterprise. The Computer Sciences department will find a different instructor if Captain Pike has not returned us to our teaching roles when the semester begins.”

“How long are you going to be gone for?” she asks, realizing she’s been shaking her head as he speaks. But he’s teaching, he’s an instructor, he has to be back next week when classes start.

“Unclear.”

“But how long do space trials normally take?”

“I do not know. It is impossible to ascertain until they have begun.”

“But…” she starts again, staring at the center of his chest and trying to wrap her mind around what he’s saying. She can’t. Her thoughts aren’t working right and his words are slipping through her like water, like she’s hearing them muffled and far away and they can’t find purchase in her mind. “But days or weeks or months?”

“To provide any more specificity would render my answer inaccurate.”

“Approximate, then.”

“Why?” he asks, which draws her up short.

The tiny rock she finds with her foot scrapes and grinds against the pavement as she drags her toe over it, working it back and forth.

“I can come grab it,” she offers, looking up from the ground to meet his eyes. “And thanks-“ She has to pause and clear her throat, which feels like there’s something stuck in it. “Uh, thanks for thinking of returning it for me.”

“Of course,” he nods and he wouldn’t have always done that, just accept her appreciation, would have launched into some explanation of how it was the logical choice and gratitude is therefore irrelevant.

Then again, she wouldn’t have always thanked him, either.

They’re halfway to his apartment when she realizes that she can feel him looking at her.

“Not months,” he says when she glances up at him.

“Ok,” she says softly.

She doesn’t take her shoes off when they get to his apartment and lingers right inside his doorway as he sets his boots under his coat rack and crosses over to his bookshelf. 

She can’t help but glance around at the now familiar room, lit in the soft golden light of the lamp on his desk and the orange glow of streetlights coming through the window. When she left the other morning the sun had been streaming in, a rarity for San Francisco. Now, she can see the fog outside, wispy bits of mist and haze against the dark of the night.

It only takes him a moment to bring the padd back to her and she takes it without looking at it, her eyes locked on him.

“So,” she starts, then can’t remember what she was going to say next. She folds the padd against her stomach, her hands crossed over it and glances down at it before looking up at him again. “Thanks.”

“For what?” he asks and she nods down at the padd. She already thanked him. She didn’t need to do it again, but other words aren’t really coming to her.

“And,” she says, feeling her mouth move on whatever it is that she was going to say, something that doesn’t come out. She doesn’t know what it was going to be and just drags her teeth over her lower lip, biting at it in a way that’s a bit painful, listening to the silence between them. She tries to swallow except that her throat still feels tight. It’d be better if it wasn’t like that, if she could breathe easily and if her heart would stop pounding, a sickening rapid flutter that is making it hard to think. “So, I’ll… I’ll let you get to packing then.”

She rises on her toes to press a kiss to his cheek, thinking that she might hug him goodbye except that she’s holding the padd. She wishes she weren’t since he’s so tall that it would feel good to put a hand on his arm while she’s brushing her lips to his cheek, but she can’t figure out how to unclench her hands from around the padd and then the moment’s gone and she’s dropping back on her heels, that careful distance still between them.

“See you around,” she gets out but then she’s stepping forward to press against him, one hand uselessly clutching the padd and the other coming up to grip the back of his neck, drawing him against her. She tilts her face up and they’re kissing over and over, their mouths pulling and tugging at each other’s, his bottom lip drawn between hers, and then his top one, and then he’s doing the same, kissing her like that until it pulls a soft sound out of the back of her throat.

She can feel how tightly he’s holding himself, a control in his frame that she’s never felt before and it’s that which makes her step back, her fingers coming up to press against her lips, replacing the ghost of his touch with her own.

“Sorry.”

He doesn’t say anything in response and instead there’s just the sound of their breathing. She wonders if he can hear how her heart is hammering. She can, and can feel the blood rushing in her ears like a dim roar.

She needs to go. He has to pack and get up to the ship and Pike is waiting for him. Maybe not right this second, but Pike’s expecting him before morning and Spock isn’t on her time anymore, he’s a Commander and an officer and he has his job to get to, one that doesn’t involve her. She’s going to go back to her dorm, turn in her application for Advanced Morphology and get ready for the beginning of the term, which he will very likely miss. 

“I’m, um-“ she says, then nods back at his door behind her, the one that goes out into the hall, to the edge of campus the faculty apartments are on, and down the path that leads back to her dorm, her room. She could call Gaila when she leaves. Will call her. That thought calms the way her stomach is turning over and over. “I...”

The padd falls to the ground with a clatter and she has his instructor’s jacket in her fists, is yanking it up his back as she tilts her head back for him, raises her face to be kissed and kissed and kissed. When he presses into her, she can feel the hard jut of the doorframe meet her back, the press of his palm under her jaw as he drags her up into his kiss, their tongues sliding together and the hot skin of his back under her nails. His hand shoves under her shirt, her skirt, the hard heat of his body trapping her against the wall. His hand is on her thigh, under it, dragging it up over his hip and with one firm push he has her off balance, his hand under her leg and his weight against her the only thing that’s keeping her on her feet.

She can’t get his pants open, not with the way her hands won’t work so instead she just shoves her hand into them, gripping him. She can feel the tightness of his body against hers, the power with which he’s pinning her against the wall, and he’s so much stronger than her but when she raises her hand to push at the middle of his chest he backs up and when she pushes again, he takes another step. 

She gets him into his bedroom, gets him down on the edge of his bed so that she can kneel over him, use that hand on his chest to push him on his back. Her fingers cooperate long enough that she gets his jacket and shirt stripped off of him and she’s scratching her nails over his stomach as he works his pants open, their hands bumping together so that her skin tingles. She peels the fabric apart as she bends down and mouths along the hot length of him through the fabric of his boxers, feels his fingers grab at her hair and tangle into it, his hips rise off the bed. 

“Off,” she tells him, her hands sliding under his hips and jerking at his pants.

He’s gorgeous like that, his pants stripped off and his stomach heaving, a green flush mottling his neck and chest and she has to taste it, has to drag her teeth over his ribs, nip at the skin over his collarbone and suck at the hollow of his throat, lightly at first and then harder until he lets out a shaky breath and raises one hand to her shoulder.

She thinks he’s going to push her off or flip her over but instead he tips his chin back, baring his throat to her. She wants to take her time but can’t, doesn’t, just makes her way up to his mouth, kissing him hard and firm, over and over as he holds her head in both hands.

She has to stop to get her boots off and it nearly breaks the moment, nearly makes her think about what they’re doing, but then his hands are covering hers, helping her jerk them off her feet and then she’s getting pulled against him and down into his lap, his mouth on her breasts through her shirt and she’s not thinking about her shoes any more.

His hands palm over her stomach, against her skin and under the fabric, scooting up until he’s tugging at her bra, his mouth rising enough to pull at the skin of her neck.

“Just-“ she says, trying to tell him to let stand her up so that she can take her clothes off, but his arm is wrapped low over her waist, pinning her down against him and then his fingertips are skating over her nipple and she’s clawing at the back of his neck, getting swept away in his touch, the press of his body.

Leaning away to grab at his bedside table drawer gets his attention, gets the arm around her to loosen enough that she can open it and get her hand inside. Stripping off her shirt does too but she loses track of the condom when it falls from her fingers as she tries to get her bra off. She can’t because his hands are all over her and the way his mouth pulling and sucking at the top of her breasts is searing through her thoughts, blanking them, and then her bra is off, tossed on the floor, and then she’s on her back and her skirt and panties are gone too.

She feels like every sense is full of him, his scent, his skin against hers, the sound of his harsh breath and how his mouth tastes as he starts kissing her again but it still isn’t enough and she rubs her foot over his calf, presses restlessly up against his body.

She pats at the bed until she finds the condom, the foil pricking against her palm as she grabs it. She tears it open and nearly drops it again with how restless he is on top of her, his mouth everywhere. She’s not stopping him, though, can’t get her fill of him like that and the moment she’s wormed her hands down between them and unrolled it over him he’s pressing her legs back, his hands spread on the back of her thighs and she’s letting out a sound that’s close to a whimper as he pushes into her.

“More,” she demands, rocking up into him even though that first thrust was a lot, is burning in her, hot and slightly aching. 

But it feels so good like that, his body on hers, a deep pang in her legs as he presses them back, how it is to just give herself over to it, let pleasure and heat course through her, wash over her.

She knows her nails are biting into the skin of his back and she wonders if they’re going to leave marks, if he’s going to be up on the ship with green scratches drawn down his sides, hidden under his uniform.

“Harder, please,” she tells him and he lets out a noise that is less than a groan, a breathy, hard exhale against her cheek as he begins to move faster, firmer. His forearm is braced next to her head, his body curling into hers on each thrust and when she turns to press her face into his, his fingers fist into her hair, holding her against him. She doesn’t kiss him, just breathes against his mouth, squeezing her eyes shut and trying to get even closer to him.

She wants it to last and it doesn’t and she comes like that, gasping through it against his cheek. His orgasm is a wash of pleasure through her, hot and deep, making her press up against him, try to chase after every place her skin touches his.

Her pulse still pounding and pulsing in her as she tightens her hold on him. They’re breathing in time with each other, the skin of their stomachs pressing together and when she slips her hand down his ribs, she can feel how fast his heart is beating.

But she can’t keep him there forever and when he presses a soft, gentle kiss to her cheek, she lets him go.

Her body’s aching as he sits back and eases her legs down to the bed, a tenderness she’s sure she’ll feel tomorrow that settles down deep, makes her limbs feel heavy. 

She should get up and get dressed and go, but instead she draws the sheet over her crossed legs and watches as he gets a duffle bag from his closet and begins pulling clothes out of his dresser.

“You don’t keep clothes on board?” she asks. Her throat is dry and she swallows, trying to unstick it.

“I have never been there for this length of time.”

“Oh.”

There’s something endearing in the way he shakes out his instructor’s uniform before he tosses it in his hamper, like he’s making sure it’s as neat as possible.

“You must have pretty big quarters.” His apartment is nice. Spacious for one person. She’s pretty sure that the captain and first officer quarters on ships are fairly large as well and probably those of the rest of the senior staff. 

“It is a relative measure.”

“Sure.”

He glances over at her as he steps into his pants and she thinks that it’s strange to watch him dress and maybe stranger that it’s his active duty uniform not his instructor’s blacks. 

“However, they are superior to other options,” he says.

“They haven’t expanded ensign quarters just because it’s the flagship?” she asks as she draws her knees up under the sheet and wraps her arms around them. Her skin still feels heated, like her entire body is overly warm and her heart is still beating too fast, so that she can feel her own pulse.

“They have not,” he tells her as he fastens his pants.

“Guess that’s yet another reason to try to graduate as a Lieutenant.”

“Your motivations for your career goals are duly noted,” he says as he takes another uniform shirt out of a drawer.

“Good,” she says, resting her chin on her knees. “I hope it’s sufficiently exemplary reasoning.”

“Highly logical,” he tells her and when he glances at her she gives him a small smile.

That tight black shirt looks just as good on him as the undershirt he wears under his instructor’s jacket, and the blue jersey hangs on him just right, hugging his chest and pooling loose around his narrow waist.

And he does have a scratch on his back. It’s not deep, just a faint green line against his pale skin. It’ll be gone within a day or two.

“You must be excited,” she says as she shoves the sheet back and stands, unable to take her eyes away from how his hands look as he pins his insignia on his shirt. His neck is still slightly flushed, a green tinge to it that hasn’t fully receded.

“I would presume that you would have a similar anticipation in regards to the beginning of the term.”

“Of course,” she says as she searches for her underwear, even if it sounds slightly hollow. She would be so, so excited if she were going out on a brand new ship. She’s not, though. She’s going back to her dorm and starting classes and this time next week she’s going to be doing homework. She lets out a breath as she steps into her panties and looks around for the rest of her clothes.

She has half of the knots worked out of her hair and is watching her fingers pull through the rest of the tangles in his bathroom mirror when he comes up behind her. Their eyes catch and hold for a moment, her hands stilling in the mess that is her hair as she watches his reflection. She can feel his body behind hers, that peculiar wash of warmth she feels every time he’s close to her and she stares back at him, barely breathing as he watches her in the mirror. He looks neater, more put back together and she can still feel the prickle of sweat on her skin, the way her blood hasn’t stopped coursing through her.

He doesn’t speak and neither does she and maybe she should or he should but then his arm brushes against her as he reaches for his toothbrush and he’s gone again. She doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, finds that she can’t, and instead just bends down to splash water over her face and tries to breathe, in and out, the sound muffled by the running water.

“Send me a postcard,” she tells him when they’re outside, right before she steps away from him to walk back to her dorm.

“I do not know what that is.”

“Perfect research opportunity for you,” she tries to say as lightly as she can. She’s not sure it works though because her voice is doing something funny, like it keeps threatening to crack.

“I will take that under advisement.”

“You should.”

She crosses her arms over her chest, looks past him, beyond his shoulder and down the path that leads to HQ, blinking at it a couple times.

“Enjoy your weekend,” he tells her and she nods, since she should and it’s her last free days until the semester ends, but somehow the idea of being at loose ends until classes start feels like a gaping amount of time to fill, like it’s too much and too empty to even be able to conceive of.

“You better send me those edits pretty quickly so that I have something to do,” she says and tightens her arms around herself.

“I will endeavor to.”

Of course he will. He has the Enterprise to worry about now, and then the classes that he’ll have to get caught up on if he doesn’t make it back for the start of the term and wrapping up his role as her research advisor as quickly as possible is probably the only logical course of action.

“I’ll-“ she starts, then swallows against the trembling, shivering feeling in her throat, in her chest. Her eyes feel hot, like they’re prickling slightly and she blinks, raises her hand to rub at the corner of her eye. She didn’t know how she wanted this to end but this is apparently it, in the middle of a path on campus, standing a few feet from each other. “Bye.”

He nods and before she can stop herself, she reaches out and tugs at his sleeve.

“Say goodbye,” she tells him and the way his mouth quirks in the slightest of smiles makes something in her chest flutter.

“No.”

“C’mon.”

“I would prefer not to,” he says in a voice that is too low and too soft and then he’s stepping forward and pressing a kiss to her forehead. She reaches for him as he does it, watches how her fingers spread over his chest, pressing into the soft fabric of his science blues and the hard heat of his body, and then she’s letting her hand drop as he turns from her.

He doesn’t look back as he walks away, which she only knows since she watches him until he’s out of sight.


	22. Chapter 22

“Hey,” she hears and looks up from her bowl of cereal into bright, sparkling blue eyes, crinkled at the corner that are just so, so obnoxious.

“No.”

“Missed ya.”

“Good for you.”

“How was your summer?”

“Fine.”

“Mine was great, thanks for asking.”

Nyota just dips her spoon back into her bowl and takes another bite.

The mess hall is crowded and noisy, cadets shouting across the room to greet each other, chairs being scraped back every few seconds as someone else rises from their seat to exchange handshakes, hugs, and other species appropriate forms of saying hello.

It’s loud. It’s really, really loud and it’s too much noise and she didn’t sleep well last night so her head is aching with beginning of the semester nerves and the knowledge of a long day ahead of her and really, Kirk is not helping.

“We in class together?” he asks as he smears cream cheese across his bagel.

“I hope not.”

“What’re you taking?”

“I have to go,” she tells him, dropping her spoon onto her tray and beginning to pile up the padds she was trying to read. “I have class and I have to get to work.”

It’s her first day, not just of classes but of being a TA and she should probably be more excited but the most she can muster is a weary sort of resignation.

“But I just got here,” he says and she nods, shoving the padds into her bag.

“I know.”

“She’s in a bad mood,” Gaila whispers to Kirk, loud enough that the neighboring tables can probably hear her.

“Let’s cheer her up,” Kirk whispers back.

“Just stop,” she tells them as she stands up.

She’s got her bag over her shoulder and is picking up her tray when Kirk shoots her one of those grins, the sort of which she’s seen make more than one women actually giggle.

“No, but listen Uhura cause I-“

“Cut it out, Kirk,” she snaps and he draws back, swallowing the mouthful he was speaking around. He glances at Gaila quickly, then back at her again.

“You ok?” he asks.

“I said I’m fine.”

She pushes her chair in with her hip and has dropped off her tray and made it nearly out of the mess hall before he catches up with her.

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not in the mood to deal with you right now.”

“Yeah, I got that,” he says and then follows her out of the mess hall anyway. “Look, I applied to take the Kobayashi Maru? That test that fourth years take?”

“You’re not a fourth year, Kirk. You should know that, I thought you were considered some type of genius.”

“Right. Yes. I mean I am a genius,” he says, stepping in front of her so that she has to walk around him. “And I’m not a fourth year. But they said I could do it if I got a good enough bridge crew assembled and I want you there, Uhura.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Resume builder,” he singsongs, stepping in front of her again so that she can’t get around him this time. She glares at him and he gives her a small smile, gentler than his normal smirk. “Rough week, I get it. But just think about it, ok?”

“No.”

He still doesn’t step aside, just looks at her for a long moment.

“Are you alright, Uhura?”

“I’m…” she starts, then swallows and tightens her mouth. “Yes.”

“You, uh, wanna talk?” he asks, rubbing his hand over the back of his head and squinting at her.

“No.”

“Ok, ok,” he nods, patting her arm awkwardly and finally stepping aside. “Um, feel better?”

“Thanks,” she mutters.

She doesn’t feel better, not the rest of that morning as she goes to her first classes of the semester, not during lunch, which is a protein bar that she eats bent over a padd in the library, at not at the gym afterwards where her legs feel heavy and stiff and she finally gives up on running and just stands in the shower for too long, staring at the tile wall as the sonics beat into her skin.

She’s looking forward to working for Wyke and the idea of a semester as her teaching assistant is the only thing that gets Nyota to pull her clothes back on, step into her boots and make her way to the Xenolinguistics building.

Commander Ho’s waiting in the hallway outside of Wyke’s office looking slightly harried and speaking quickly before Nyota’s even halfway to her.

“Wyke’s pregnant,” Ho says.

“Sorry, sir?” Nyota asks.

“Lieutenant Wyke is pregnant and decided to transfer to Deneb II so that she can be near her parents, so Lieutenant Machesky’s going to be teaching Advanced Morphology,” Commander Ho says, dropping the stack of padds she’s holding into Nyota’s hands. “I need you to go through the Romulan tutorial again, Cadet, just to make sure that it’s completely ready.”

“The Romulan tutorial?” Nyota asks as the top three padds threaten to slide onto the floor.. She juggles the stack as she looks up at Ho. “Sir?”

“Commander Spock uploaded it to our server and he said that you just needed to run through it once more to make sure that everything’s correct in it.”

“I, uh - yes, sir, of course.”

“I thought he told you that.”

“He was-” Nyota swallows and tips the padds back against her so their weight is resting against her stomach and chest, adjusting them for a moment as she tries to figure out what to say. “He was finishing up a couple projects.”

Like her paper. And apparently the tutorial even though he told Ho that and not her and that’s fine. He was busy. Is busy, she imagines.

“Right. Well. No rush, Cadet, just get to it as soon as you can.” Ho glances past her, down the hall and Nyota turns to see an officer she’s never noticed around the building before, tall, blond and slightly out of breath. “Lieutenant Machesky?”

“Commander,” he says, giving Ho a quick nod as he smooths his jacket down, tugging at it like he just threw it on. 

“This is Cadet Uhura, and your new office,” Ho says, nodding to the door across the hall. 

“Hello, sir, nice to meet you,” Nyota says, but he’s not looking at her. 

“Uhura has the course materials,” Ho says. “And she took the course last year.”

“She’s Wyke’s TA?” Machesky asks.

“I am,” Nyota answers.

“She is and now she’s yours,” Ho confirms, already stepping away from them. “Have a nice first day back, Cadet, Lieutenant.” 

“Sir,” Nyota murmurs, nodding to the Commander as Machesky walks into his office. She follows him, slightly unsure of what she should do with the padds or herself. He doesn’t exactly tell her, so she sets them neatly on the corner of his desk. He immediately picks them up again, setting the first half in a haphazard pile to the side and spreading out the remainder so that his desk is scattered with them.

“Redo these,” Machesky says when he finally looks up at her again.

“Sir?”

“These,” he repeats, handing three padds to her that have Spock’s handouts from last semester.

“How so, sir?”

“I just need them redone, Cadet, that will be all.”

“Sir?” she asks again, since most professors let their teaching assistants work in their offices with them and she doesn’t know if he’s dismissing her or not, and he hasn’t told her what exactly he wants done with the handouts and he hasn’t even bothered to say hello. Which is fine. She should be used to senior officers failing to observe social niceties but even still, it makes her feel slightly deflated. It should be Wyke who’s standing there across the desk and it shouldn’t be Machesky who’s ignoring basic courtesies. 

“Cadet?” Machesky asks, not looking up from the padd he’s holding.

“Would it be possible to get a little more detail?” About the handouts, when he wants her to come back, what she’s supposed to be doing for him, what he expects from her. Where to sit.

“I’ll message you.”

“Yes sir,” she says, tucks the padds into her bag, and when he doesn’t dismiss her more formally, she finally just leaves.

That night at her own desk, she refreshes her inbox five times in a row, her chin propped on her hand and her attention focused on the lack of new messages every time her inbox pops up again, even though her message queue is the last thing she wants to be looking at because mixed in with her new classes syllabuses, announcements from the Xenolinguistics Department and reminders about student clubs starting up again are Spock’s comments on her paper, dated at 0437 the day he left. She doesn’t know whether to think that it’s touching that he was that set on getting it done that he did it that night or if he just wanted to have everything on Earth wrapped up and taken care of before he shifted his attention to the Enterprise. Everything which also included the Romulan tutorial that he could have given her a heads up about, but didn’t.

“Don’t,” Gaila says, reaching out to smack at Nyota’s hand whens she refreshes her inbox again. “Or if you’re going to do that you probably should just write him back.”

“I don’t need to write him back,” Nyota says even though she’s told Gaila that so many times by now that it hardly bears repeating. “And I have work. Which I could do if Machesky would tell me how to do it.”

“You have work already? Don’t you want to go out?”

“I want to go to bed,” Nyota corrects. “But he wants me to redo the handouts for class.”

“And Machesky is… hot. Delectable. A looker. Bangable material. I met him once and damn, you guys have some seriously good looking people in your department.”

“Pedantic.”

“Pedantic?” Gaila echoes. “You sure you aren’t talking about a certain Commander?”

“He’s making me redo all of Spock’s materials from last semester,” Nyota sighs.

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” she says, then sighs again. It’s fine. It’s fairly useless work and she doesn’t see the point and Spock was a great teacher and his handouts were clear and succinct and there’s no real sense in recreating them, but it’s fine. It’s what she signed up for when she chose to apply to be a TA so there’s really no sense in complaining about it, except that all she wants to do is get in bed, drag the pillow over her head, and close her eyes against her headache.

She could go ask McCoy for something since he always has hypos stashed away, but instead she just refreshes her inbox again.

“Are you going to sit there all night doing that?” Gaila asks, giving her a pointed look when she hits refresh yet again.

“No. Yes.”

“You know, you could-“

“I’m not going to message him.”

“You should.”

“Machesky said he’d send it.”

“I meant the Commander.”

“I know,” Nyota says, rolling her neck back and forth and not looking over at Gaila.

“But-” 

“I don’t need to write him anything, I don’t have anything to say.”

“Don’t you have some questions about his comments?”

“No.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” Nyota says, then drops her head to her hand. She feels terrible and should just walk down the hall to McCoy’s room but Kirk is probably there and she just can’t deal with him right now. Instead she pinches the bridge of her nose and wills her head to stop pounding. “I can figure out what he meant.”

“Do you want to read what he sent again? Cause you seem to really like reading what he wrote so-“

“I don’t.”

She doesn’t like reading what he wrote, not at all even though she keeps opening his message and scanning it, since it’s curt and to the point, just a list of suggested edits and that’s it.

Which is fine. Exactly as fine as Machesky’s rampant desire for her to redo all the class material and his apparent decision to not tell her how he wants that done.

She tries not to think too hard about the little niggle of annoyance over the task and tries to ignore the much larger, duller twinge of something that feels gloomy and a bit miserable that’s lodged right above her stomach. It’s just the beginning of the semester and maybe her first year she was really excited to start and last year was the same but by now she very much knows what she’s in for, a long semester with too much work and not enough sleep and she leans her head on her hand, idly tapping her stylus against the edge of her padd as she waits for her inbox to refresh yet again.

…

The next morning, she pastes on a smile as she gives Machesky the new handouts, the ones she finished at breakfast since his message arrived in the middle of the night. He’s fine, really. Not exactly as good looking as Gaila seems to think, not even a little bit, but there’s nothing wrong with him, per se. He’s just a bit… He’s fine. Absolutely fine.

“Sir?” she asks as he scrolls through the padd. “I didn’t say this yesterday, but I really appreciate the opportunity to work for you.”

“You got a good recommendation from um...” he starts, then trails off. He raises his head enough to blink at her, like he’s half forgotten that she’s there. “The Commander. Commander Spock.”

“You talked to him?” she asks, but Machesky doesn’t answer, just looks back at the handouts. He may not have. Maybe Wyke was the one who called him, or even Commander Ho. Not that it matters. She draws her teeth over her bottom lip, watching Machesky read through the padds. “Sir, if there’s a chance at some point for us to sit down and meet about it, I was working on a paper with him and I was wondering if I could ask your opinion on which journal I should submit it to?”

“It’s a stab in the dark, Uhura,” he says, not looking up. “All very political as to what papers are chosen for publication. Really doesn’t matter.”

“The paper doesn’t matter or what journal I choose?”

“Both, honestly. It’s all…” He just waves his hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it.”

“Yes, sir,” she says and feels that hollow in her chest that seems to be there more often than not threaten to grow, so she tries to focus on what’s actually in front of her, the padd he’s holding. “Are they ok? The handouts, sir? Is there anything else you’d like to see changed?”

“Thanks, thanks,” he mutters as he squints at them, which doesn’t actually answer her question. “And the slides, too?”

“Sorry? What about the slides?”

“I asked you to reformat them?”

“I…” She swallows, tries to keep smiling but can’t. “I’m afraid I don’t recall that conversation, sir.”

“I swear that I asked you.”

“I… You might have,” she makes herself say, even though he didn’t and his message hadn’t contained any mention of them either. “I apologize.”

He waves her off, still peering at the handouts. “Well, just get them fixed up by this afternoon. I want them a little more accessible.”

“Accessible?” she repeats.

“Less technical,” he tells her.

“I’m not entirely sure what you mean, sir,” she admits, since Spock’s slides seem pretty straightforward to her.

“Just… simpler,” he says. “By 1300, ok?”

“Yes sir,” she answers since she can go for a jog at night instead of in the late morning like she was planning and she doesn’t actually have to eat lunch and she can in all likelihood skim the reading for Cardassian Orthography as she walks to class. “No problem.”

She does get them finished in time for lunch but her Intermediate Comparative Sociolinguistics instructor messages the class with the news that since everyone just completed Intro to Comparative Sociolinguistics that spring, she’s expecting them to pick up the semester right where they left off and as such, there’ll be a quiz at the beginning of class. Which is tomorrow. And Nyota hasn’t looked at the material since the end of last term, so ends up spending her free hour thumbing through her notes and thanking herself that she had spent the weekend getting organized for the term. Which had been the only thing that she had done all weekend besides sleeping and half watching a movie on Gaila’s padd, trying to stay focused on it even though she couldn’t. Her mind had kept wandering and she had mostly stared blankly at the screen, trying not to think too hard about anything in particular and even when the notice had come that she had been accepted as a TA, she had just toed aside her own padd and resumed staring at the movie.

She wishes it were still the weekend or the week before or the week before that, when campus was quiet and calm, not this rapid bustle of cadets and instructors, so many that it makes Nyota’s head spin.

There are crowds of cadets everywhere, on every patch of grass the used to be empty over the summer so that she doesn’t see Stoyer until the other woman stops her with a quick smile.

“First week back going ok?” she asks and Nyota makes herself nod.

“Absolutely.”

“Bit tough getting back into it?”

“Not at all.” She makes herself smile too, along with nodding. “Like summer break didn’t even happen,” she says, trying to get the words to sound easy and light even though she’s pretty sure they don’t.

“It’s hard with them gone, right? But I bet Spock’s loving it. Puri’s emails are nearly illegible he has so much he wants to say about everything.”

“We haven’t-“ Nyota swallows, tries to keep smiling. “We haven’t really talked much. Um, at all.”

She shouldn’t have said it like that since it just makes Stoyer narrow her eyes, her mouth slightly parted like she’s trying to figure out how to respond. But Nyota’s hungry and she didn’t sleep well again and her headache from yesterday hasn’t really gone away and she just really wants to go running or go to bed or just find a quiet place to sit until she feels like she can get herself back together and none of that engenders a scenario where she could have come up with a better response.

“Well, none of my business,” Stoyer says finally, looking like she has half a mind to make it her business. 

“It’s not-“ Nyota starts and has to swallow again because talking today is somehow really hard and she’s having a lot of trouble getting words to come out. “It’s nothing. To worry about, I mean. 

“If you say so,” Stoyer says and there’s something about her voice that’s too gentle, that makes Nyota look away.

“It’s not anything,” she assures her, giving the Dean another quick smile. “And I’m sorry, but I have to run to class.”

“Take care,” Stoyer says and then Nyota’s swept away with the crowd, her head buzzing and her hand pressed to her stomach where that empty feeling is sitting again.

…

The second week back is no better than the first and when Nyota opens her door on Friday afternoon, she lets out a breath that borders on a groan. “Really?” 

“Sorry,” McCoy says from where he’s sitting on the end of Gaila’s bed with piles of padds and filmplasts around himself. “But I brought you a cup of coffee.”

“Thanks,” she says since the coffee smells good and she’s already had a long day and the amount of homework she has to do looks like it’s on par with McCoy’s. “Are they in your room?”

“It’s either me coming here or me sending them over here.”

“We need new roommates.”

“We do,” McCoy nods.

“We’re too nice to them.”

“We are.”

“They don’t deserve us,” Nyota says, dropping her bag onto her own bed and picking up the cup that McCoy brought her. It is good. Not as good as the tea she’s been drinking in the Xenolinguistics building’s breakroom, or the chai from that cafe she and Spock used to always go to, but it’s still good even though it’s probably replicated, which makes her think of Pike’s coffee maker.

“What’re you smiling about?” McCoy asks.

“How’s your semester going?” she asks, ignoring his question.

“Fine,” he shrugs. “One of the doctors at the hospital is out so I’ve been picking up more shifts. Did you have a good summer?”

“It was…” She takes another sip of coffee and stares down into the steaming liquid. “Short, it feels like. You?

“Yeah, I was at home.”

She takes another sip and maybe she does wish that he had gotten her tea, but this is fine too. “It seems like a long time ago now.”

“It always does.” McCoy taps his stylus against the edge of his padd a few times. “Jim wants me to tell you to do that sim with him.”

“I’m sure he does.” She puts the cup of coffee on her desk and sits on her bed to pull her boots off. “I’m busy, though.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“Good,” she says and McCoy nods and they lapse back into the silence that normally exists between them. It’s not uncomfortable and never is, not after so many nights that they’ve spent like this when Kirk and Gaila have been in one or the other of their rooms. 

McCoy is thankfully quieter than Gaila is, and instead of talking to her every few minutes, he lets her get to work and enjoy her coffee that she still wishes was tea in peace. It’s only when he starts gathering his things that she glances up from her padd.

“Are you going to kick them out?” she asks, since she might go to the library if Gaila’s going to be coming back to the room.

“Hospital,” McCoy answers, shaking his head. “Night, Uhura.”

“Goodnight,” she tells him as he shrugs his bag onto his shoulder and leaves.

She sips at the last of her cold coffee, frowning down into the cup before she tosses it into the trash receptacle and bends over her homework again. Except that now with McCoy gone, it’s suddenly harder to focus and the fact that it’s Friday keeps buzzing around in her mind and she finally drops her stylus onto her desk and starts rubbing at her forehead.

It’s just taking a while to get back into the swing of things, is all. And she could go to the gym and try to work out some of the exhaustion that seems to be plaguing her, or she could go get dinner since she hadn’t bothered to eat earlier, or she could lay down for a few minutes and see if a quick nap helps her focus, or she could switch gears entirely and get to work on the Romulan tutorial, but instead she reaches for the padd that she shoved in a drawer a couple days ago.

She doesn’t exactly like looking at her paper and she was very much lying to Gaila about understanding Spock’s suggestion and she flicks the padd on and then off and then on again. She could write to him. She has twice now started to but both times she deleted the message because it just didn’t sound right, like she couldn’t really find the flow of words that she kept searching for.

She could try again. Should try again, really, because her nearly finished paper is just sitting there and if she’s sure of anything, it’s how illogical it is to not just finish it. She is perfectly capable of composing a message to him, one that is just as succinct and short as what he sent her and she should, instead of just sitting there staring down at the padd, the one that she had dropped on the table across from him all those nights ago at that cafe.

She could call him, too, but she’s not going to. She’s going to write to him, then start her homework again. She’ll do that and avoid calculating how long it will take him to respond and won’t poke at her inbox, refreshing it over and over like she can already imagine doing. And she’s not going to think about that, the interminable wait before he gets back to her and she’s not going to think about how short his last - and only - message was, not when she’s busy not thinking about how great it felt to hand him this very padd, and how his hands looked as he held it and how rapidly and focused he read it. And she is really, really not going to call him.

She glances at down at the padd again, sits up and grabs her comm.

“Spock here,” he answers before she can finish deciding if she would rather her call just go to voicemail.

She has to ignore the sudden, nervous tick in her stomach in order to get words out.

“Hi, it’s-“ she starts. Me, she was going to say but he has no reference of why she’d be calling in the first place rather than sending him a message, and she isn’t ‘me’ to him over the comm. They were never like that. She was ‘Nyota’, a big step up from ‘Cadet’ and now she’s not sure what she is. Or if she should be saying ‘hi’ at all and not something more formal and if she should have even called in the first place since now that she thinks about it it’s a little strange. She’s never called another professor on their personal line over a schoolwork matter. 

Then again, she’s never had a professor’s personal number before now.

“Hello,” he says and she can tell just by the way he says it that he knows it’s her. Of course he does, he has her number too and they’ve talked on the comm before, but that doesn’t stop her from letting out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. 

“Is this a bad time?” she asks.

“It is 1747. I am unable to quantify the significance of the time unless you give me more specific parameters,” he says and she lets herself sink onto her bed and stop pacing around her room since his answer is just so… him.

“I meant are you busy?”

“Yes. I am occupied speaking with you.”

“Glad to see that space hasn’t affected your sense of comedic timing,” she says, curling her legs under her. She picks at the hem of her skirt, one of her older ones from her first year so it’s a little worn, the fabric well broken in and soft.

“That is illogical,” he responds and she can’t keep from letting the corner of her mouth curl up.

“I know it is,” she says as she rubs the fabric of her skirt between her thumb and forefinger. “And I called because I wanted to ask about your message.”

“It was not clear?”

“It was kind of-” She pauses and fiddles with the fabric for a moment. “Brief.”

“It was?”

“Yeah,” she says, shrugging even though he can’t see it. “And I figured that you probably wanted a chance to talk at greater length for your thing for Desai.”

“Thing?” he repeats and that makes her smile again like it always does when he repeats back one of her colloquialisms.

“Your enormous intellectual crush on him. You keep wanting me to add more of his analysis into my paper.”

“It would strengthen your argument and improve your chances that it would be published in an elite xenolinguistics scholarly journal.”

“You’re sure it’s not just so that you can run into him at some conference and tell him about the time you got a student to cite him thirty times?”

“Thirty would be superfluous and furthermore I believe he is retired.”

“Still,” she says. She can hear the warmth in his tone but he still sounds a bit brisk, like just being on duty up there has made something about him crisp and efficient, or maybe it’s just that he’s just waiting for her actual questions and doesn’t want to sit around on the comm. Which is fine because she didn’t call to chat, she called to ask his advice on fitting Desai’s theoretical perspectives into her paper and what would be best to cut out to make room for it.

When they’re done talking about it, when the padd she gets out is full of notes and he’s given her enough guidance that she feels confident about the revision, she sets her stylus down and finds herself picking at her skirt again.

“So I’ll let you go, I’m sure that you’re busy.”

“I had thought that you would be as well,” he says and there’s something in his voice, something in how he says it that keeps her from answering right away, makes her glance around the room and at the pile of padds waiting for her on her desk.

“It’s not too bad,” she finally tells him, since it’s not like it’s midterms or finals yet. Not that there’s isn’t a lot of homework for her to do tonight, enough that with rewriting that section of her paper and now spending this time on her comm with him, she’ll either be up past when she wants to be or she’ll have to finish it all in the morning. Which is fine. She’s used to skipping breakfast so that she can get work done.

She thinks he’s about to hang up, a silence from him that’s long enough that he’s either in the middle of snapping his comm closed or he’s reminding himself that he needs to say goodbye, but instead she hears him draw in a breath.

“How are your classes?”

“Fine.” She tugs at the hem of her skirt, picks at a loose thread. “Good, actually. I like my Cardassian class a lot.”

“Who is the instructor?”

“Cretek.”

“I have heard she is quite popular.”

“I can see why.”

There’s another slight pause before he asks, “And the position for Advanced Morphology? Is it enjoyable?”

“Yeah it’s… Machesky’s teaching it, not Wyke.”

“Is that so?”

“He’s teaching it really differently than you did.”

“In what way?”

“Well I don’t think anyone’s terrified of him, so there’s that. Also his reading assignments are half as long.”

“I wished to be thorough.”

“I know,” she says with a smile. “He’s having me change all of your materials.”

“Why?”

“No idea.” She tugs at the thread again and tells herself to stop since she’ll just have to fix it if she messes with the hem too much, then keeps pulling on it. “He was out the other day so I got to teach the class. That was… it was pretty cool.”

“The temperature in the room was cold? You may have thought to raise it.”

“It’s times like these that make me realize how you got so far in your career with that big brain of yours,” she says around a smile. Teaching the class was pretty awesome if for no other reason than Machesky wasn’t there and she got a bit of a break from him. Not that he isn’t fine, but she’s found that he’s just… She purses her lips and winds the end of the thread around her finger. “He said that, um, that it doesn’t matter where I submit my paper? That it’s all chance, anyway, if it gets published?”

“That is inaccurate.”

“Oh. Good. That’s, that’s good.” She nods to herself and smooths her thumb over the thread. “Ho asked me to go through the Romulan tutorial one last time. I didn’t realize that you had uploaded it.”

“I did.”

“Yeah.” 

“I assumed that you would be occupied with the beginning of the semester.”

“No, no, it’s fine. Of course. Thanks for, um-“ She tugs at the thread again even though she tells herself not to. “No, thanks, I’ve been busy. Definitely.”

Comms make a particular sound when no one’s speaking, a quiet hiss of silence that always gets under her skin, makes her itchy and uncomfortable.

“How’s space?” she asks because she doesn’t want to listen to it anymore. 

“I believe you took the required Introduction to Astrophysics course so you are able to answer that.”

“Very funny. And yes, I did. And got perfect marks, which of course you also know.” She shifts slightly, leaning back against her pillow and stretching her legs out in front of her. “And fine, specifically how is the ship?”

“Excellent,” he says and just the way his voice sounds makes her smile again.

“Where are you?”

“Currently in orbit over Neptune.”

“That’s not that far,” she says. “Are you… are you on your way back already?”

“No.”

“Oh. Ok.”

He’s quiet again and she can’t help but tighten her fingers over her comm. She half wants to look up at the ceiling but she’s not entirely sure if Neptune’s risen yet and for all she knows, she could already be looking in the right direction, past her comm and through the floor of her room.

“You have homework to attend to, I will not detain you further,” he finally says and she shakes her head even if he can’t see it. She’s pretty sure she’s the one keeping him and who knows what he’s up to, if he has work to get done himself, or another shift to get to. She could ask him but it seems like he needs to go.

“I do,” she says, glancing at her padds again before looking back down at her comm. “I’m glad that it sounds like things are going well.”

“For you also.”

“It’s… Yeah, it’s good here.” Different, but she already told him that, or at least about his former class. “And it was good to talk to you, too.”

“Have a pleasant evening, Nyota,” he says and then there’s a moment where she thinks he’s going to say something else or maybe she is, but as soon as she resolves to – what, she doesn’t know – she hears the sound of his comm clicking shut.

She stares at her own comm for a long moment and finally slowly folds it closed. She normally leaves it in her bag while she works since she doesn’t like to get distracted by it, but tonight she doesn’t bother to move it from where she places it on her desk, next to the padd she wrote her paper on and the one she just took notes on during their conversation, both of them set carefully to the side so that she can glance at them as she starts her homework.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3/12/15 – Friends, first of all as ever thank you so much for all your enthusiasm. It makes it so much fun for me to know how much you guys are into this.
> 
> A lot of you mention that you want to know what Spock’s thinking, why he’s so reticent to tell her how he feels, what he’s up to when we don’t see him, or what specific scenes are like from his POV. I don’t think I can re-write this entire work from his perspective because I have a long list of stories that I want to get to after this one, but I am beyond willing and thrilled and excited to get into some of Spock’s experience if you all are interested. If anyone wants, you can put a specific scene or a question in a review or a PM or an email to me (I’m this same handle at gmail) or you can go to my tumblr (same handle) and scroll down to the ‘ask me anything’ link and unless I’m wrong, you don’t have to have your own tumblr to be able to use that. I’m happy to either write a scene or just an explanation and you can either choose between those two or I will. I’ll post it to my tumblr and tag it as ‘the place between’ so you can find it there. And, for those reading this who are not tumblrers or who aren’t following me, there’s already some posts in that tag about the scene with Amanda and Sarek, Spock’s history with Puri, and why Spock might have so many freaking condoms.
> 
> And as ever, thank you for reading this and loving it. The end is obviously coming but it’s frankly not very soon. We’re getting there, obviously, but we’re not there yet since probably half of the fun with a fake dating trope is what happens when there’s no more fake dating. I very much hope that you enjoy what’s coming up as much as you have been!

“Uhura!” she hears and just keeps walking.

“Hey, hey-“ Kirk says, jogging the last few steps to her. She’s almost made it to the library before he catches her and lets out a long breath, staring at the doors. She could probably just keep going, but in all likelihood he’d follow her inside and she’s not entirely sure that he’d keep quiet, library or no.

“What?” she asks.

“Have you thought any more about that test?”

“Which test?” She has three quizzes coming up and doesn’t really want to think about them since she also has a paper to write. She is nearly entirely certain that two other students in her class want to do the same topic so getting access to the padds is going to be tough, which means that she has to get to the library now and check them out, not in ten minutes when Kirk is done bothering her.

“The Kobayashi Maru. I have to give them an answer.”

“I don’t even know what it is,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest, which makes her bag slip down her shoulder. She tugs it back up and grips the strap in her fist.

“It has Klingons, you’ll love it.”

“No.” Speaking Klingon gives her a headache. It’s nothing like the flowing, lyrical languages that drew her to xenolinguistics in the first place and of all the languages she knows, it feels the most like a chore, making her throat sore and her head throb.

“It’s a rescue mission,” Kirk says, raising his eyebrows at her and grinning.

“Ok?”

“Don’t you want to rescue people?”

“Computer generated pixels? No thanks, I have work to do.”

“You aren’t going to get another shot at this until next year.”

“And… wow, I don’t care. Imagine that.”

“But it’s a big deal.”

“For you.”

“No,” Kirk says and that cajoling, wheedling tone is gone from his voice. “It’s actually a big deal. I wasn’t joking when I said that it’s something to put on your resume.”

“My resume is fine, thank you,” she says even though she hasn’t done that many sims, not that Kirk needs to know that.

“It’s on Tuesday at 1600.”

“Today is Tuesday.”

“Next Tuesday. Next, next Tuesday, I mean. Which is why I need to tell them the crew roster soon.” Kirk looks at her all big blue eyes and a charming smile, his head cocked slightly to the side. “C’mon.”

“No.”

That smile fades and then drops as he gives her a little nod. “Yeah, sure. I’ll see you later, then?”

She doesn’t answer and he finally walks away and leaves her blessedly alone. He’ll find someone else, she’s sure. Hannity, who is a fourth year and who Nyota’s always heard is amazing at bridge simulations, even if her grades aren’t all that great, or Barrett who is annoying as all hell but would probably do it for Kirk if he asked him.

There’s more options for comm officers for these types of sims than there are good topics for her paper, so Nyota trudges up the steps of the library, then up to the fourth floor and down the long corridors of the stacks. She loses herself there for a long time, thumbing through padds and deciding on what she’ll need before being jolted out of the moment by her stomach rumbling, overly loud in the quiet.

She presses her hand to it, trying to remember if she had breakfast or lunch, or both or neither, and then deciding that she doesn’t really have time to figure out the answer to that since it’s much later in the afternoon than she thought and she needs to get the Romulan tutorial finished up so that it’ll be done, so that she can write this paper, so that’ll be done, so that she can start studying for the first of her quizzes.

The Xenolinguistics lab is thankfully empty, with most students either at the gym or grabbing an early dinner since most classes are done for the day and she sets her stack of padds to the side, drops her bag on the floor with a heavy thump and drags her favorite chair over to the console, glad that nobody else is there to be annoyed with how it squeaks against the tile.

Her happiness at being alone is quickly tempered by the fact that she hasn’t used any of the tutorials in a long time, since she breezed through most of the ones the Academy had during her first year and then decided that learning languages by reading newspapers and watching holovids was more challenging and therefore more fun. The interface is completely different and not just unfamiliar, but confusing and inconsistent, like a textbook that has been recreated on the screen, not the organic progression of language learning that she very much prefers.

And there’s nobody there to help her sort through the controls, which is fine because she can figure them out. It just would have been better if she’d had dinner first, or had enough spare time that she didn’t have to waste half of it just making sense of how to use the tutorial.

She hears footsteps in the hall and hopes that it might be another cadet or even Commander Ho, but when she glances up to see Machesky walk by the open door she thinks only very, very briefly about asking him for help and then thinks about just trying to do it herself and then rifles through her bag for her comm and scrolls through to Spock’s ID.

She nearly flips it closed after she connects the call, staring down at her hand around the black casing and wondering what she’s doing. He’ll be busy. He doesn’t teach in Xenolinguistics any more. He doesn’t have time to tell her how to go through the tutorials. He won’t be interested anyway since he’s out on a ship with far more important things to be thinking about.

“Hey,” she says when Spock answers, his voice tinny and sounding like it’s coming from really far away. It is, of course.

“Hello,” he says and there’s the slightest echo of a delay that is the hallmark of calls over this distance, one that is wholly absent whenever she’s speaking to someone closer.

“Do you have a second?” she asks, about to hang up if he says that he doesn’t. He won’t. There’s so much that he has to work on that has nothing to do with Xenolinguistics and it’s not a mistake that he finished her paper and his work on the Romulan tutorial before he left. He wants to be done with all of this, she’s sure.

“Just one?” he asks and she forgets to be nervous about calling him, feels that apprehension that cropped up between closing her fingers over her comm and hearing his voice dissipate like it was never there in the first place.

She rolls her eyes even though he can’t see it and sets her comm on the table in front of her. Her fingers left foggy, sweaty lines on the sides and she wipes her palm on her skirt.

“I meant, do you have a chance to talk in between your incredibly important job of taking the flagship out on an interstellar spin.”

“It is important.”

“Is Pike letting McKenna and Olson do donuts out past Pluto?”

“Donuts are easily replicable in the mess hall. I do not know why they would seek the Captain’s approval before procuring them for themselves.”

“Remind me to take you and that car of yours out to some parking lot sometime,” she says.

“If I inform you of anything, it is that donuts are a particularly unhealthy food choice,” he says which makes her stomach growl again.

“Have you ever tried them?”

“No.”

“That’s a shame,” she says, digging through her bag for a protein bar. “I called to ask you about the Romulan tutorial but instead I’m going to recommend that you should really consider trying a donut.”

“I will take that under advisement,” he tells her and she smiles at her comm. “Is there a problem with the tutorial?”

“With all of them,” she says, giving up on her search and shoving her bag aside with her foot. “These are incomprehensible, they should really be redesigned.”

“I did redesign them.”

“Oh,” she says, frowning at the screen in front of her, then tapping in a few commands. “Well you did a pretty terrible job.”

“I did not.”

“No, you did. These are atrocious. What was wrong with how they were?”

“The files were occupying substantial space on our servers and there was not capacity to update them without greatly reducing their processing speed.”

“Still,” she says, thumbing through a few more screens. “This is not better.”

“It is.”

“It is not,” she tells him, tapping at another screen and then groaning. “Spock! You removed all of my colloquialisms.”

“Yours?”

“I did them with Lieutenant Commander Haught last summer. For each and every language, all of the idioms and phrases and turns of expression that are helpful to know. Do you have any idea how long those took?”

“Based upon the rate at which you typically complete projects I can surmise-“

“Did you delete them? I cannot believe you,” she sighs, propping her elbow on the edge of the console and settling her chin into her palm.

“I might take this opportunity to redirect your ire towards Commander Ho.”

“Nuh-uh,” she says. “Nice try.”

“It was her-“

“Excuses,” she says. “Don’t want to hear it.”

“Perhaps if you you send me your recommendations I will review possibilities to reprogram the tutorials and forward them on to the Commander for consideration.”

She has no time. Less than no time since she shouldn’t even be talking to him right now and should really be working. She should just tell him that since he’ll understand. He was a cadet once and he worked with her all summer, he’s more than able to grasp that one more thing on her plate isn’t going to work out, that she just can’t handle it.

“Sure,” she finds herself saying instead. There’s that annoying crackle in her comm with neither of them speaking, so she adds, “If you don’t get back soon, there’s going to be a whole host of cadets speaking Romulan better than you do.”

“Apparently not with the quality of the programming of the tutorials.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Tell you what about it?”

“Nothing, no- Oh stop, you know what I mean,” she says and then there’s that same crackle again, the faint hiss of static that always drives her a bit nuts. “Before I let you go-“

“Are you currently occupied?”

“Yes. No,” she corrects, since she’s just staring at the screen, not exactly working on the tutorial. “But you know Kirk? He wants me to take this training sim with him, this test?”

“Is that a question?” Spock asks and she wishes that he were there next to her so that she could level her long sigh at him instead of just at her comm.

“Very funny. I just wanted to know if you thought… I don’t think many of my friends have ever done it,” she says, not that she’s exactly asked them about it. “I was just wondering if you’d heard of it? The Kobayashi Maru?”

“I have,” he says and she thinks he might have hesitated before answering, but he doesn’t ever hesitate when he speaks so she chalks it up to that dim echo of the distance between them.

“Kirk said it was something that fourth years take but I was just…” She doesn’t know what she’s asking, not really. If it’s a good idea, if it’s something she should bother doing, if Kirk is right that it’s worth her time. “I wanted to know what you thought.”

“My initial reaction is to inform you that you are not a fourth year student.”

“See, Spock, that’s why they say that Vulcans are so smart. I’m continually impressed by your brilliance.”

“Truly?”

“No.”

His pause is discernable this time, not a trick of her imagination but a long beat while she listens to the fizz of static. “I am not able to offer you any advice on the matter.”

“Ok, of course. I wasn’t-“ Asking about that she almost says, but she was.

“Commissioned officers are not permitted to discuss the details of such trainings.”

“No, I get it, that makes sense.”

It does, really. It’s just that even though she knows he’s a Commander and graduated years ago, all the time she’s spent with him has only served to make the difference in their ranks seem diminished somehow, less important than it used to be.

Sleeping with him probably didn’t help that matter, the very thought of which makes her cheeks flush with heat.

“When is the test scheduled to take place?” he asks, which is good. Concrete. Something to think about other than the hot skin of his shoulders under her palms and the way his breath hitched and caught because that is not something she should be remembering.

“Tuesday,” she answers, maybe a shade too quickly.

“It is currently Tuesday,” he says and she nearly laughs, biting at her lip to stop it from bursting out of her even though something in her chest feels a bit heavy at the reminder that he’s an officer and there’s that distance that then exists between them, nearly greater than the hundreds of thousands of miles between Earth and the Enterprise.

“Next Tuesday, I meant. But you’re such a genius, I’m telling you,” she says, fighting back the knot that has settled in her stomach. “No wonder you graduated at the top of your class. Is knowing the date a skill that all exemplary officers are supposed to possess?”

“Indeed.”

She starts to say something about that – what, she doesn’t know, but something. Instead finds herself asking, “When do you think you’ll be back?”

“Perhaps this week or next.”

“Oh, really?” she asks, reaching out and running her thumb over the edge of the monitor. “That soon?”

“I may have a number of commitments to return to and I believe that Captain Pike will be eager to be back as well.”

“Are you going to tell me all about your trip?” she asks, still thumbing the monitor.

“What would you like to know?”

“Uhura?” she hears from behind her. “Can I talk to you?”

It’s Barrett standing there with that half eager look he has most of the time, which she finds more annoying than she probably should, and right now it’s even more irritating than usual.

“No, not right now, I’m busy,” she answers, shaking her head and turning back to her comm.

“Ah, pardon,” Spock says.

“No, no I meant-“ She gestures behind herself, towards the door but he can’t see it, of course, because he’s not there with her.

“You are occupied.”

“I’m- it’s just the tutorial, really, it’s not- But if you have work to get to-“

“I do not wish to delay you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she says even though she’s the one who called him and she doesn’t even have to go right then since Barrett thankfully left. “Ok. Goodnight, then.”

“It is evening.”

“Right. Well. It won’t be forever,” she says, then grimaces and raises a hand to cover her eyes.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, don’t… Bye. Uh, goodbye. Talk to you later. When you get back, I mean.”

“I will speak with you then.”

“Great, yeah… Bye,” she says, again, and she snaps her comm closed and drops it on the desk next to her as quickly as she can, looking at the door, then the rest of the room behind her to make sure that nobody overheard any of that.

She nearly jumps out of her chair when she turns back towards the door and sees Barrett standing there again.

“What?” she asks, grabbing her comm again and shoving it into her bag.

“Machesky asked me to tell you that he’ll be out this week and that you need to cover his class again.”

She lets out a long breath, willing herself to calm the spike of irritation that forms hot and rushing in her chest at that news. “Did he say anything else?”

“No.” Barrett takes a step into the room. “Do you think that I could ask you about the Romulan tutorial you’re working on?”

“Now?”

“If that’s ok?”

It’s fine because she should help him, except that she realizes that she never actually got Spock to explain how to use the new system and she’s not exactly about to call him again after that terribly awkward goodbye, especially since he’s going to be back soon. Really soon. In a week or two and that’s not very much time at all and she’ll ask him then, get him to sit down with her for a few minutes, and maybe ask exactly where her list of colloquialisms got to.

“I haven’t finished reviewing it,” she tells Barrett, “So I really can’t, not today.”

“Sure.” He takes another step towards her even though she’s clearly packing up her bag and shutting down the terminal. “But could we go over some vocabulary now?”

“No.“ She shoves her chair in and slings her bag over her shoulder. “I’m afraid not, I have a paper to write.”

“Some other time, then.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she says, then dodges past him into the hall before he can ask her again. She might have actually stayed for longer if he hadn’t been there, but she doesn’t want him looking over her shoulder as she flips through the tutorial and she really doesn’t want to be pestered with questions – or an offer of grabbing a cup of coffee or a drink, which he’s asked before – so she just leaves the building, heading out onto the quad and wondering what possibly possessed Spock to redo those tutorials.

Commander Ho, she’s sure he would answer, can already hear him saying that and that’s fine, really, if it was an order from the head of the department.

But it’s just that if he was going to redo them, she would have loved to work with him on that and of course she couldn’t have because he must have done it last year sometime, back when he was her professor and they spoke only a handful of times, but it still would have been really interesting to be involved with that project.

And maybe she can be now, can perhaps cram it in between papers and tests and classes even though the very thought of doing so makes something in her throat burn, since she can’t even contemplate adding yet another thing to her schedule, beyond maybe just giving him her recommendations that he already asked for.

It’s fine. It’s not like he’s exactly requesting her help on it and it’s not like he’s offering to have her work on more projects with him and it’s not like he’s even coming back to the department since he’ll be over in Computer Science and she’ll maybe see him around sometimes.

Which is fine.

“You ok there?” Kirk asks and she automatically takes a step back from him.

“Where’d you come from?”

“You were walking right towards me.” He tips his head to the side and smiles at her. “You here to give me your answer?”

“No.”

“Wanna grab some food?”

“God, Kirk, no, I don’t.”

“I just meant at the mess, not out anywhere,” he says, jerking his head across the quad.

She’s already tired of mess hall food, or maybe it’s just the idea of being in there with so many cadets and officers, the crowds slightly overwhelming and the noise level too high for her to think.

“I have work to do.”

He nods, his mouth pressed tight and she swears he looks a little disappointed. “Yeah, you always do.”

“I always do,” she echoes and leaves him there on the quad as she walks to the library again.

…

It’s just that not knowing when Spock is going to be back is slightly bizarre, even though it shouldn’t be. She spends an entire day looking at the Computer Sciences building even though she knows she shouldn’t and it’s not until Gaila asks her what she’s doing that she stops, unwilling to explain herself.

She just wants to go over the tutorial. And there’s the matter of choosing where to submit her paper. And she wants to hear about the Enterprise and it’s not like she’s alone in that, since news that the ship is returning to Earth has been a hot topic among her classmates.

“Heard there’s going to be a party,” McCoy says into his oatmeal, which makes Gaila start clapping her hands together loud enough that McCoy scowls at her, his eyes red-rimmed from a night shift at the hospital.

“I cannot wait,” Gaila declares.

“Fun,” Kirk grins.

“Wonder when,” Nyota says, thinking about her midterm schedule. She tries to imagine Spock going but can’t. He might. Maybe. If Puri makes him, or Pike.

She could ask him. She could call him again and bug him about the party and get him to predict a very low probability that he’d be willing to go, some statistical likelihood that would probably be approaching zero and she could cajole him about it, but she doesn’t. He’s going to be back any day and she’ll talk to him then.

Except any day apparently doesn’t mean Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or even over the weekend and more than once she flips her comm open and then shuts it again with a hard snap only to open it once more, staring down at it.

Her paper is sitting on her desk, completely finished but not submitted to a journal yet and the deadlines for most of the really prestigious ones are coming up and she needs to get herself together to send it in, but she just hasn’t yet.

Which is why she should call him and get his advice on where she should submit it, but she doesn’t because she’ll just talk to him about it when he’s on Earth again. At the Academy. In a different department, but still there, around campus so she’ll probably end up running into him now and again.

That he might be too busy to talk when he gets back is not something she lets herself think about.

Instead, she drags herself through her days trying not to think of anything too hard because if she does, that claw of anxiety and nerves and tension that she carries with her every semester is going to rise through her chest. It’s already sitting there most of the time, making her thoughts race as she tries to fall asleep and squeezing at her stomach whenever she eats so that she spends most nights staring at her ceiling and most meals shoving her food around her plate.

Lunch after her Histories of First Contacts class is no exception, as she pushes her salad around with her fork and tries to decide if she’s going to keep eating it or if she’s going to get back to work. The idea of doing either feels like too much, so she just keeps poking at her food like under a piece of lettuce might be the best plan for how to spend her afternoon.

She could go to Machesky’s office except that she doesn’t know if he’s in and if he’s not, she won’t be able to open the door since no matter how many times she asks him for an access code, he forgets to give her one. She could go back to her room since she’s pretty sure Gaila’s in class, but she’s not certain she won’t be tempted to lay down for a nap. The student union is an option, busy enough that she’ll be awake and alert and she can probably get some reading done, or she could go to the library and squirrel herself away in a quiet corner and curl up with a long list of vocabulary she needs to learn.

Or she could keep sitting there, idly playing with her lunch.

“Hey,” she hears and doesn’t bother to look up.

“What.”

“I need your answer,” Kirk says, dropping into the chair across from her.

“Ok.”

“You’ll do it?” he asks and she can hear how his voice lifts, excited and eager.

“No, I meant ok that you need my answer.”

“Right.” He drums his fingers on the table and she’d tell him to stop but that would involve looking at him and that seems like a monumental task. “I think you should do it, though, really.”

“Ok,” she says again, shoving all the lettuce to one side of her plate and the carrots and tomatoes to the other.

“I think it’d be a good chance for you to use all of your skills, show the brass what you got.”

“Flattery isn’t going to work.”

“But you’re awesome, Uhura, better than anyone else I could ask.”

“Get Hannity to do it.”

“Everyone knows you speak Klingon better than most of the professors.”

“All of the professors,” she corrects as she piles up her cucumbers into a neat stack.

“So what’s the hold up, then?”

“Look,” she says, dropping her fork and finally glancing up at him. Damn him, he always eventually gets her to do this, to at least explain herself to him. “This professor I’m working for hasn’t been in the office recently and I keep having to cover his classes, so I don’t know if I can do the sim, if I’ll even have time.”

Covering one class, even two was fun. The idea of doing more than that seems like a lot and Machesky had said something about missing next week as well. That, plus her papers and quizzes and the impending stress of midterms, not to mention the fact that she needs to do something about her paper or the entire summer will have been a waste of time makes something ache in her stomach and chest, makes it hot and jumpy and heavy all at once. Adding one more thing on top of that seems surreal, like she can’t even grapple with that idea. And she still wants to work on the tutorials, which is pretty insane to think that she’d have time to but she hasn’t been able to let that idea go.

But the idea of actually admitting any of that out loud to anyone, especially Kirk, makes her feel sicker, makes her head pound and something trembling and shivery lodge in her chest.

“Fine,” she says. “I’ll do it.”

“Yes,” he says, smacking his palm on the table and grinning at her. “I knew you would.”

He reaches out to jostle her shoulder and she flinches away from his touch.

“Don’t.”

“Sorry, sorry, I-“ he says, snatching his hand back. “I’m sorry.”

Kirk likes to touch people. He’s always grabbing McCoy or Gaila and it’s not the first time that she’s had to remind him that she likes her personal space, likes his hands firmly and far away from her. And it just feels weird to have anyone touch her these days. Even just yesterday she shrugged Gaila off when she wanted a hug.

She’s just tired. She’s fine.

“McCoy’s going to be there,” Kirk tells her and she makes herself focus on him again. “And Sulu? Do you know him?”

“Who?”

“Helmsman.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s cool, he’s great.”

“Ok.”

She puts her fork on her plate, stands, and is pleased when Kirk lets her go without any more conversation. She chooses the Xenolinguistics building over anywhere else since there’s a lower chance that he’ll follow her there, not that he tries to walk out with her, just stays seated at her table as she clears her dishes and pushes her chair in.

When she gets there she finds that of course Machesky’s office is locked.

She gives herself a moment to hold the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and just breathe until she starts down the hall towards Commander Ho’s office.

Except that there’s a patch of sunny floor between her and Ho’s door, a bright spot of sunlight on the tile that isn’t normally there, right outside of Spock’s office door, which isn’t normally open. The sunlight is pretty, dust and other specks hanging in the light and she blinks at it, watching them swirl slowly, floating in mid air.

She blinks at his door too and finds that it is, in fact, open and when she continues to stare at it, it continues to remain ajar.

She takes a step and then another one and then finds herself in the doorway, watching Spock examine his bookshelf like he’s been there the entire semester, like he’s been there all along.

She feels the world slow slightly, narrow to a pinpoint of focus on the fact that he’s still in his science blues, that he has two padds in his hands already, that his chair is still pushed in like he might not have even been there long enough to sit down, that his office looks identical to the last time she was there all those months ago, standing in this spot and watching him speak with Pike and the Ambassador.

That he hasn’t noticed her, but when she takes another step forward he looks up.

His throat works as he swallows and she thinks for a moment, a heartbeat, a pinpoint eye blink of an instant that he starts to move towards her.

He doesn’t, but she sees his hand tighten on the padds he’s holding.

“I presumed you were in class,” he says and his _voice_.

“I was.” She swallows too, since he had a good idea of doing that and she wishes that she also were holding something because her hands feel empty and useless, hanging there in a way that makes her want to fidget and fuss. “And then I got lunch.”

“I see.”

“I was-“ She runs her hand over her hair, through her ponytail, pulls it forward over her shoulder and then pushes it back again. “I was looking for Machesky.”

“I believe you will find he is not here today.”

“He’s not.”

“His office was shut.”

“It still is,” she tells him because she checked, she was just there even though that now feels like something that happened a long time ago, in some fog of an event that has nothing to do with the current moment.

“Are you intending to teach his class again?” Spock asks and she nods, drawing her bag further up her shoulder, then smoothing her sweater, then her skirt, and then running out of things to do with her hand so she just holds her own wrist, her arm crossed over her stomach and her fingers gripped surprisingly tight.

“Have you solved the issue with the environmental controls?”

“With the-“ she starts to echo but then Ho’s walking through the door and Nyota’s still standing in the doorway and she needs to move, needs to step aside even though her feet aren’t listening to that message as quickly as seems normal. “Sorry. Sorry, sirs, I can come back later.”

She can. She should. She finds that she doesn’t move further than the two steps it takes to get out of Ho’s way.

“Machesky’s out this week,” Ho says and Nyota realizes through the syrupy murk that has taken up residence in her brain that the other woman is speaking to her.

“I saw that his office was locked,” Nyota says, trying to center her attention on Ho.

“You can cover his class again?” Ho asks and Nyota gets herself to nod.

“Of course.”

“How do the students feel about that?” Ho asks, which draws Nyota up short, gives her something to actually focus on other than Spock standing there after all this time. Not great is the answer, not that anyone of them will say that to her since she’s in class with a lot of them, sees them at the gym and in the mess hall and one or two live in her dorm.

“Right,” Ho says since Nyota’s silence seems to be enough. “Well. I’ll call him, again. Or I’ll see if I can move my meeting with Stoyer and I’ll come and teach it.”

“I am available,” Spock says and Nyota thinks that he needs to repeat that because it sounds a lot like he’s going to be in class with her, or he needs to not say anything at all because she can’t concentrate when he’s speaking, his voice rich and low and so, so much better than through a comm.

“That would be…” Ho starts, then glances at Nyota again. “Helpful. Are you really free for that period this week?”

“I would not have otherwise offered,” he says and she wants him to say that one more time, wants to hear it again, and then maybe again after that.

Ho nods, looks at Nyota, then at Spock, and then nods again. “Thank you, Commander.”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Ho says, then gives Spock a small smile. “Welcome back.”

She leaves and it’s just the two of them again. Nyota should tell him that the slides are going to be completely different than the ones he used last semester and that since Machesky has been out so much that the class isn’t caught up to where they should be, and that the students are expecting a quiz, and that if she can get into Machesky’s office she can grab the handouts for this week, and that it’s probably a different reading assignment than Spock is expecting, but she doesn’t get any of that past the flutter in her chest and whatever is sticking in her throat and then Ho’s back again before Nyota can work out how to speak.

“How many classes are you picking up now that you’re back?” Ho asks from the doorway.

“Only three,” Spock answers.

“Right, because of the Enterprise and the-“ Ho cuts herself and Nyota feels her glance at her. “Can you teach Advanced Morphology for the rest of the semester then?”

“Yes,” Spock says and Nyota feels something loosen in her chest- something that was wound tight and gnawed at her every time she thought of Machesky, of the semester, of her classes, of every bit of work she has to complete- evaporate in his single word.

Ho looks between them again and Nyota’s skin prickles under Ho’s gaze. “This isn’t going to be a problem, is it?”

“No,” Spock answers and Nyota finds herself nodding in agreement, the conviction in his voice enough that she catches Ho’s eye and repeats his answer.

“Do I need to talk to Stoyer about this?” Ho asks and Spock shakes his head.

“You do not.”

“If it was anyone else I’d say no,” Ho says, still looking between them.

“Understood.”

“Cadet?” Ho asks, since Nyota’s just been watching them.

“It’s not going to be a problem,” she promises, pushing the words out and even as she hears them she feels warmth blooming in her, making her want to smile. She wonders if they can hear how loudly her heart is beating. “At all.”

“Good.” Ho glances at Nyota again, then nods. “Well. That’s good. I’ll leave you two to it, then.”

It’s so quiet in his office with Ho gone. Peaceful too with the way the sun is still streaming through the window. Everything feels slightly off kilter, like what she was standing on just shifted under her feet, not becoming more unbalanced but firmer, solid, and she’s having trouble staunching the smile that keeps threatening.

She should say something, probably, about how he was gone and now he’s there and he’s going to be teaching again. With her. All semester. Not every day but a lot of them between classes and grading and office hours, but she doesn’t know how to put any of that into words so instead she just reaches out to take the small, stiff piece of paper that he’s holding out to her, watching her hand extend in front of her, feels her fingers close over it.

“What’s this?” She can barely look at him and can’t seem to look away, either. She wonders if he just got back, if he’s been to his apartment yet, where his bag is, if he had lunch. How the ship is, why he’s back today, so suddenly. If he’s really going to be teaching in the department again, if she heard all of that correctly, if he can perhaps repeat it in that overly precise way of his just so that she can be sure.

She goes to ask that, but instead only can manage, “Oh my God, it’s like an antique.”

“It is not.”

“It looks like one,” she says, turning it over and over in her hands. She smiles up at him, can’t seem to stop. He’s looking back at her, the sun falling across him and his eyes look so incredibly brown, warm and rich and soft. “You found an actual postcard?”

“Yes. Puri purchased one for Arlene as well.”

“You two,” Nyota grins, shaking her head and tracing her fingers over the depiction of the small Federation outpost in orbit around Neptune. Her hands are shaking. She wants them to stop doing that but she can’t quite seem to figure out how. “But, no, you have to send it. You can’t just give it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she says, handing it back to him. She really, really can’t stop smiling. She’s in the middle of his office and she should stop but it’s too much all at once and when he takes the postcard back from her she has to rub her fingers together, pressing her thumb against them, thinking that maybe she can feel the warmth of his hand so close to her own.

“I believe we have sufficiently established that is not an adequate answer.”

“No,” she tells him even though they did, repeatedly. Of course they did and it’s a terrible answer and she really doesn’t care. “You have to actually send it and you have to write something on it.”

“What, specifically?”

“Just something,” she answers and can’t stop the way she’s smiling even though she is trying to. “It’s just the way it is.”

“This is not rational.”

“No, I know, it’s totally not.” She runs her hand over her hair and wishes it weren’t trembling like that. She didn’t have enough lunch. She should eat. He should, too. He looks thin, thinner than normal or maybe that’s just his uniform, that blue shirt that he’ll be trading out for his instructor’s jacket. “Do you want to maybe-“

“Commander?” Ho calls, sticking her head back into the office. “Sorry, I just realized I need you to fill out a couple forms.”

Nyota follows them into the hallway where the sun is still falling on that same patch of floor and dust is hanging in the beam, suspended and still. Everything else is the same – a couple of office doors are open, Machesky’s is firmly shut, and someone’s laughing in the break room, the noise spilling out into the hall.

Spock tucks the postcard against his padd, and holds both behind his back as he turns towards Ho’s office. “I will see you soon.”

She’s still smiling. “Yeah. See you soon.”


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 3/23/15: First off, I’m so sorry about the delay, but unfortunately Nyota is not the only student around here facing midterms.
> 
> You guys were AMAZING with selecting what you wanted to see from Spock’s POV. It is so much fun, I can’t even put it into words how great a time I’m having with them. I’m not quite through all of them, so if I haven’t gotten to yours keep an eye on my tumblr for it. This chapter is a slight diversion from the story since it was clear that so many of you wanted to know what Spock was up to while he was gone. It hadn’t really occurred to me to delve so deeply into it, but once I started it was so much fun that I wrote this chapter and the next one on his time away. We’ll get back to Nyota’s POV and the rest of the story soon, but for now enjoy a little detour into Spock’s mind.
> 
> Thanks to albino-frog for editing the overly loquacious nature of this chapter :)

It is not until he receives a call from Lieutenant Rand four days after he has left Earth that he admits to himself how much attention he is paying to both his communicator and his message inbox. It is logical that she contact him as it is the beginning of the semester and he anticipates that a new round of cadets will attempt the Kobayashi Maru. What is illogical is the speed with which he retrieves his comm to ascertain who the call is from.

“Same presets as the last time?” she asks and he forces himself to appreciate her exemplary attention to her position as assistant programmer as others he has worked with have not remembered the way in which he prefers the simulation to be run at the beginning of each term.

“Please,” he says, as focusing on the test is preferable to acknowledging the frisson of frustration that she is the one who has contacted him. “How soon do you anticipate the first group of students will want to schedule it?”

“A couple weeks,” she answers and while he would be partial to more specifics, he knows that if she had additional information available she would have disseminated it. 

“Very well,” he tells her and is pleased that he does not need to remind her to keep him informed as she is sufficiently adept in her duties that she is already aware of his desire.

That it is one of the only things he has found pleasing recently is not something that he chooses to dwell upon as he closes his comm and sets it carefully upon the corner of his desk.

He is appreciative of Rand’s skill and recently has noticed it on numerous occasions, but is unsure if she was always so proficient at her work or if the time he has spent with Nyota has rendered him better able and more willing to recognize such details in his human coworkers. It would not be the first change in his life that has been brought about by the effect of her company.

It would also not be the first time that he has attempted to not think of her and found it to be a useless endeavor. Invariably, his thoughts return to her much more often than he deems suitable or desirable. 

He does not let himself check his messages again as it would be illogical, perhaps even more so than the rapidity with which he reached for his comm. Instead, he leaves both his padd and his comm on his desk, stands and departs his quarters before he finds a reason to remain.

That he has found such grounds to be near his communication devices he attributes to his wish to ascertain whether Nyota understood the comments he sent her regarding her paper. He knows that he is overly preoccupied with the thought, something which he understands even though he does not condone such behavior from himself. It is illogical. If she has questions she will contact him, which is a similar line of reasoning as to his certainty that if she wishes to speak about topics other than her paper, she will also make such an overture.

It is immaterial that he hoped that she would write him back so that he, in turn, could write to her again and inquire after her classes, her other projects, her new position as a Teaching Assistant, and any other general information regarding the beginning of her semester that she might be inclined to share. Hope is irrational and not a line of thinking that he should allow himself to indulge in.

Similarly, he resists giving into idle speculation over what she is currently doing or how she is occupying her time. He has also resisted even the consideration of writing to her a second time in order to ascertain such information and on each occasion the urge arises he reminds himself that if she wishes to contact him, she will do so.

He does acknowledge - though does not wish to - that if she did not respond to him a second time, it would be proportionally worse to have two unanswered messages rather than just one. It is an appreciable factor in his reluctance to write to her again. 

There is little he can do to prevent his impulse to contact her as well as his hesitancy regarding the matter and while he does not find his behavior acceptable, he has discovered recently that the memory of Nyota’s conviction that he dispense with the notion of precedents and standards for his conduct is calming to him. More than once he has meditated to the memory of that conversation and found that it leaves him more centered and focused.

The memory of what happened after that discussion continues to threaten to make him flush, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

It is not a recollection he allows to surface with any regularity and yet he often finds himself dwelling on such thoughts in the moments before sleep, or when he is not sufficiently absorbed by his work.

He supposes that it is fortunate that conversation is spilling out of the mess hall as he approaches so that he is not tempted to continue on such thoughts, even though gratitude at the notion of dining with his crew mates is a poor description of the emotion that rises to the forefront of his attention, no matter his attempts to remain unaffected.

While he does not share the Captain’s enthusiasm for spending time socially with the crew, nor fully agrees with the logic behind it, he understands that it is part of his duty as first officer. Still, he does not relish the chatter of noise he can hear even outside the doors to the mess hall.

He similarly rues the fact that except for the Captain, the entirety of the senior staff except ?are sitting together so that he has no option that humans would deem courteous other than to join them, which removes the chance that he might eat with Puri in relative privacy and peace.

The only favorable circumstance is that it appears that Puri has only recently begun eating and the others at the table are nearly done.

“Nothing like replicated food, huh, Commander?” Lieutenant McKenna asks as Spock approaches with his own meal

“That is accurate,” he responds with the hope that no more similarly inane comments are directed towards him, but with no expectation that he will truly avoid them.

He is forced to choose between sitting across from Puri - which would necessitate being seated next to McKenna - or further away from the Lieutenant but the Doctor as well. The latter option would afford him the opportunity to speak with Hawkins, whose company Spock finds generally agreeable, while the former would increase the likelihood he will be able to converse with Puri.

“Did you finish the Botany Lab installation?” McKenna asks as Spock sits and he immediately regrets his decision to forgo sitting nearer to Hawkins.

“Yes.”

“Is it ready for me to hook up the isometric transference modulator?” Olson asks without swallowing the entirety of his mouthful and Spock diverts his attention from the Chief Engineer as swiftly as possible.

He nods instead of answering as the fact that the lab is now prepared for the isometric transference modulator should already be apparent and requires no further explanation on his part.

He is also optimistic that avoiding a longer discussion about the topic will induce both Olson and McKenna to finish their meals swiftly. 

“How’s the lovely Miss Uhura?” Puri asks when the other men have finally left their seats, Hawkins trailing slightly behind the other two.

He begins to answer that she is certainly busy before he reminds himself that he only assumes that is the case. Any alternative reason for her lack of communication lodges in his stomach and while he attempts to quell such physical manifestations of his emotions it is as ever a significant challenge to do so completely.

“I’m sure she’s excited to be back in class,” Puri offers when Spock remains silent.

Again, he begins to answer that he is confident that is the case before he remembers the ways in which she failed to convey enthusiasm over the beginning of the semester. It had been something he had meant to ask about but had not found the time to do so before he had left, as his departure had been necessarily swift.

That the personal interactions with which he might obtain such knowledge might have drawn to a close and no more may present themselves is not a thought that aids in resolving the hard knot in his abdomen.

“It is simply that-“ he begins before realizing that he failed to notice Captain Pike’s approach from across the room until the other man is standing next to their table. He is smiling for no discernible reason as he looks between them.

“May I join you?”

“Of course,” Puri says and kicks a chair away from the table despite the fact that the Captain is fully capable of pulling it out himself. “Spock was just complaining about the fact that his gorgeous new girlfriend also happens to be a cadet and is too busy to talk on the comm for hours and hours.”

“That is incorrect,” Spock corrects as while Nyota is undeniably attractive, is enrolled as a student at Starfleet Academy and is therefore preoccupied - as is logical and admirable - with her studies, she is not engaged in a relationship with him and therefore Puri’s comment is inaccurate. Furthermore, it is conjecture on Puri’s behalf that Nyota’s lack of communication is the cause of Spock’s consternation. 

That he is correct in his presumption is only more irksome.

“That’s too bad, Spock,” the Captain says as he sets down his tray. Spock assumes that the fact that the Captain continues to look at him means that he is expected to respond in some manner, but he is unclear of what reply is required from him after such a statement, so remains silent. 

“I think we’re going to swing by Neptune,” the Captain finally says. Spock is unclear if he has forgotten that he informed the senior staff of this fact at the end of alpha shift or if this is simply an example of idle conversation. He could have asked Nyota were she there.

A small knot of frustration and distress sits in his throat at the fact that she is not. It is not the first time that such a psychosomatic response has occurred at the thought of her absence, nor is it the first time that he has failed to sufficiently control his body’s reaction to his emotional state.

“That’s my favorite planet in the neighborhood,” Puri says as he resumes eating his meal. “It’s so blue. Perfect aesthetic for me.”

“That is illogical,” Spock informs him, only to have Puri poke his fork towards him.

“Nobody asked you.”

“It remains true, regardless.”

That he is silent for the remainder of the meal clearly draws the attention of Puri and Pike as well, and while Spock recognizes this, he finds the effort it would take to engage in conversation disproportionately large in comparison with the ease of not speaking and occupying his attention with his dinner instead.

When the Captain rises from the table and bids them goodnight, Spock can feel Puri’s attention on him.

“Spock,” he says, leaning across the table.

“Yes?”

“Is everything ok?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been logically perturbed for days now.”

“I have not.”

Puri chews the final bite of his meal slowly and though Spock does not look up from his own plate, he is nearly entirely certain that the Doctor is watching him.

“Have you really not gotten much of a chance to talk to her?”

Spock sets down his fork with more force than is strictly necessary.

“You yourself said that she is unavailable due to her commitments as a student,” he says, straightening his fork so that it is parallel to his knife.

Puri nods and while Spock is by far inexpert at matching facial expressions to emotions, he has more practice with Puri than most, and can recognize an indication of disquiet in the other man’s manner.

“Can I ask you something?” Puri asks.

“You have already done so repeatedly and I have sufficient evidence from the years of our acquaintance that I will not be able to dissuade you from continuing.”

Puri hesitates for a moment, a trait that Spock is certain that he learned from Arlene and one which predicates a more personal question. He attempts not to tense in anticipation.

“Did you two break up?”

They were never dating so it is not deceitful to say, “No.”

“Ok,” Puri says and nods. “Good. I didn’t know if maybe… I’m glad things are well with you two. Satisfactory. Adequate. Acceptable.”

The current circumstances are none of those descriptors but Spock finds himself unwilling to dissuade Puri of the notion.

That the Doctor knows him well enough to recognize Spock’s omission of continued reassurance and lack of composure is frustrating. That he finds it frustrating simply serves to make him ashamed of such an emotional response and he focuses on the calming, orderly process of placing his fork and knife neatly and precisely on his plate.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Puri asks, leaning across the table, both of his forearms braced upon the edge. “I know that it’s hard to suddenly be gone. Trust me, I was talking to Arlene and-“

“No,” he repeats, firmer this time as Puri shares a number of social traits with humans and an increase in tone and volume tends to better convey his meaning when simply stating it does not.

Puri also shares a number of traits that include stubbornness, so Spock does not find himself overly surprised when he continues the discussion.

“Remember how hard it was for me when Arlene was a professor and we were students?”

“Yes,” Spock says even though he is aware that Puri fully grasps the fact that he has a perfect memory. It does not dissuade Puri from using such rhetorical devices in conversation as a questioning of his and Spock’s shared recollections, much to Spock’s ire.

“I think you’re doing the right thing, letting her focus on school and not badgering her with calls all the time.”

“I must return to the lab,” he says in lieu of a response, as he is not able to reply that he is similarly certain that it is the correct course of action. 

As he leaves the mess hall, he is unable to stop dwelling upon the fact that even if she were to contact him, he has not fully answered to himself what the desired outcome of a conversation with her would be. Ascertaining her contentment with the beginning of the semester, certainly. Asking after her new responsibilities as a Teaching Assistant and whether she is enjoying them. Discussing the final steps needed to complete her paper, though he is certain that she is capable of undertaking them without his guidance.

Anything more is a line of contemplation that has occupied his thoughts frequently and with greater regularity as the summer drew on. 

He wonders what might have happened if he had approached her at the end of the previous semester. He had never given it any sincere thought despite the fact that he had certainly noticed her then – he is certain that half of Starfleet has noticed her – as in the wake of the end of his relationship with T’Pring, pursuing a new one had seemed too much of an effort and too large of an undertaking. It was a venture he had considered only briefly and with Nyota only in theory since while she had certainly captured his attention, she had been indifferent towards him in their few interactions and with the disparity in their ranks he had not presumed to include her in any true or further consideration of individuals with whom he would be inclined to pursue a more personal connection. 

That he had ended up sharing as much with her as he did, both in terms of the sheer amount of time they passed together, their physical interactions, and the details about his life she came to know, was unexpected to say the least.

He has turned the quandary of exactly what relationship exists between them now and what type of relationship he aspires to have with her over in his mind and has thus far been unable to draw a satisfactory conclusion. He has wondered more than once what her opinion is, as if gaining that perspective might help to elucidate his own. Yet when he considers what exists between them from her perspective, all that he is left with is that she repeatedly stated that she wishes for their arrangement to remain professional. He does not know what to make of the fact that she voiced that desire more often in the beginning of the summer than towards the end, nor how to account for the ways in which their relationship evolved as time passed. However, he does recognize that she never verbalized a renegotiation of the parameters of their arrangement, nor alluded to any wish to do so. Complicating the matter is that he cannot readily reconcile such events as her attending dinner with him at Puri and Arlene’s, nor her willingness to engage in conversation with his parents, nor any of their more personal interactions - and the physical ones especially - with her stated aspiration for professional interactions. 

That he cannot extrapolate any firm interpretation from her actions has been preoccupying and to his chagrin, more distracting than he would prefer to allow himself.

He knows with certainty that he does not wish to return to Earth and find that they have no interaction with each other. He has come to value her advice, her insight, and her company more so than he could have ever predicted. He finds her diverting, engrossing and more than once has found himself utterly captivated by her, both her opinions on matters which she voices with no hesitation as well as her physical presence.

That he wishes to consider Nyota much more than an acquaintance is something that he has only recently admitted to himself and moreover, is immaterial without her enthusiastic participation in changing the nature of their relationship and as such has not occurred, he is stymied as to how to proceed.

He deems it best to wait for her to contact him, as without her wish to engage in a more formal relationship with him, any desires on his part are inconsequential. However, as days pass with no correspondence, he becomes increasingly disquieted by the thought that this silence between them might be indicative of what awaits them when he returns to Earth.

That he would return to the Academy and yet not see her and not continue to interact with her regularly is distressing. That thought is one that he attempts to avoid with increasing difficulty, as each time he seeks to clear his consciousness of the underlying anxiety, thoughts of her intrude into his focus.

The following night at dinner he finds that he has replicated pok’tar for himself, the same dish he ate during the meal they shared at the Vulcan restaurant, and the first taste reminds him viscerally, powerfully, of passing her fork back to her, the way she had held it in her long, slim fingers, the expression on her face when she tried it that he found more amusing than perhaps he should have. The cup of coffee that Pike brings to the conference room every morning as they review the day’s duty roster puts him in mind of watching her attempt to brew herself a mug in his kitchen and her increasing vexation with the process. When Hawkins spends an afternoon uploading Circinian to the ship’s database of languages he remembers her using their word for asteroid in their game of Scrabble, and when Olson sits down to dinner with a bowl of ice cream Spock can distinctly recall the unnatural coldness of the food, the heat of the sun, and the way Nyota smiled as she ate her own.

She has not messaged him because she is busy. He understands this, and was once a cadet himself. 

She likely feels no need to contact him regarding the message he sent, which he also comprehends as she needed little guidance on her paper over the summer. 

He is obligated to admit the fallacy in creating a situation where she would contact him with questions when he expects she will have none due to her capacity for comprehending topics that are more difficult than most humans are able to grapple with.

Her intelligence was a characteristic that had drawn his awareness when she was his student and had continued to make an impression on him throughout the summer, an attribute of herself that was accentuated by not only her attention to detail and the enthusiasm with which she approached her work, but also her ability to focus for prolonged periods of time. Since coming to know her as well as he has, he is not surprised that she was among his top students.

Her ability to work independently and exercise self-direction, especially in such topics as finishing her paper, is admirable. Also slightly aggravating.

He debates broaching the matter with Puri, but doing so might necessitate explaining the particulars of the arrangement between Nyota and himself and he was honest with her when he said that he was unsure that he could aptly describe such a complicated agreement.

He cannot help but remember telling her that as he lay next to her in his bed, a soft sheen of sweat dampening her skin, the delicate structure of her knee under his hand, the way her hair slipped through his fingers.

Such recollections are exasperating due to their ever increasing frequency as well as the fact that they seem to serve no purpose other than to intrude on his thoughts and form a small knot of distress within him that exercise, sleep, and meditation do nothing to diminish.

What is perhaps most frustrating is that he has no clear course of action available. Even if he applied himself to pursuing a deeper relationship with her, he has never been engaged in a monogamous, romantic relationship with a human and while Nyota has been helpful in explaining the parameters of dating, her instruction on the matter never extended to what occurs if dating continues and flourishes into something more. Furthermore, she failed to elucidate on exactly how one might go about beginning a relationship with someone who one previously had a fabricated relationship with, when the other individual in said arrangement displayed a wide variety of behaviors that had no discernible explanation, from overtures of friendship, sexual intimacy, and repeated statements that nothing more was to occur. 

He wishes that his ability to discern emotions through touch was at all helpful in this instance but so far it has proven to only exacerbate his uncertainty regarding her opinion of him. While he can perceive sexual interest and at times moments of amusement or mirth, he did not wish to intrude and the small insights he gained inadvertently were inadequate to inform a larger understanding of her emotional state. 

It remains that it would be irrational to resolve to pursue a more formal relationship with her when he is unable to determine the steps to take to achieve such, as well as her own opinion on the matter.

In lieu of more information, any contact with her, or the ability to return to Earth so that he might see her again even inadvertently, he waits.

The longer he does so, the more likely it becomes that she will not in fact contact him and that any desire on his part to deepen their relationship is his and his alone.

He supposes that it is fortunate that his duties aboard the Enterprise are sufficiently engrossing that he is able to spend an increasing amount of time out of his quarters and away from his comm and personal padd.

Contemplating returning to Earth and failing to see her as often as he did over the summer is more upsetting than he will allow himself to feel. In light of such, he is forced to admit that his decision to change positions from the Xenolinguistics Department was perhaps ill-advised. He had first opted to do so not only for his own research purposes and the ability to devote more time to the overly demanding requirements of administering the Kobayashi Maru, but also that he did not wish for any lasting repercussions of their arrangement to cause her discomfort or distress when classes resumed. It was a decision he had made early in the summer and one which now seems misguided, in that it will fail to allow him opportunities to see her.

That she has not contacted him as a result of that discomfort or distress and that she wishes to be done with her association with him, and her lack of communication is a symptom of that wish, is a thought that weighs heavily. If such is the case, then changing departments was wise.

The more time that passes without communication from her the more he is forced to acknowledge that it could very well stem from that desire to cease any connection between them.

She is compassionate and caring, two traits he greatly admires in her. It is entirely likely and all too possible that this silence is how she deemed best to inform him of the fact that she does not wish to pursue even a friendship and is doing so to spare him an uncomfortable conversation.

The thought of returning to Earth to find her reticent to speak to him is sobering.

It is something that he steels himself for with increasing frequency. He forces himself, even though it is disquieting, to picture greeting her politely, professionally and having no more insight into her life than any other former professor would have, and no more contact with her than he does with any of his other former students.

It would not be his preference.

He decides that he will speak to her when he returns. He is not entirely certain what he will say, how he will approach her, or what the result will be, but talking in person is favorable to contacting her through writing or over the comm. At the least, he will be able to convey his wish that she is enjoying her semester and perhaps at most, he will extend an opportunity that they create a time to speak further, perhaps regarding more personal topics if she is willing. She will not be his student, so the hesitancy that plagued him all summer over the disparity in their ranks and the resulting imbalance of power in their positions will be perhaps not be entirely extinguished but at least diminished to the degree that he will be less troubled that she would feel discomfort over such an overture. 

He imagines returning to Earth only to find that she has initiated a relationship with someone else and swiftly resolves to not let the thought cross his mind again.

Nevertheless, it does so more than once and he finds himself picking up his comm, opening it, and then closing it again and setting it on the corner of his desk.

She is fully capable of making her own decisions and he will not attempt to influence her. If she wishes to contact him, he is sure that she will. Until then, he will remain patient.

...

When she does finally call, he has been on the comm for the entire afternoon with Lieutenant Rand and therefore fails to trouble himself to check the ID of the caller as he erroneously assumes it is the Lieutenant calling him once again about a line of code they have been working on.

It takes him longer than is suitable to return her greeting and even when he does, it must be somehow inadequate as she immediately asks, “Is this a bad time?” 

It takes him a similarly unacceptable delay to ascertain the exact hour and minute.

“It is 1747,” he tells her and in his unsettled state, adds, “I am unable to quantify the significance of the time unless you give me more specific parameters.”

“I meant are you busy?”

Of course that is what she intended to convey to him. He blames the swift reorientation from thinking about the Kobayashi Maru for failing to recognize her underlying concern.

“Yes,” he answers, automatically stating the truth before realizing that his answer might be unintentionally off-putting. He attempts to conjure up a more appropriate response that will assure her that he is available to speak with her, but is only able to produce an equally bald statement of fact. “I am occupied speaking with you.”

He attempts to quiet his mind, which is racing, and to center himself, but it is a futile endeavor. Her call is so unexpected as to render his thoughts disorganized and jumbled, an actuality that he has enough awareness of to find unacceptable even if he is unable to regain control over them.

“Glad to see that space hasn’t affected your sense of comedic timing.”

“That is illogical,” he says before being able to truly assess the veracity of the logic in her statement. This is not the first time she has rendered him significantly flustered and he finds it as disquieting as he does fascinating. No one else has ever elicited such an unsettled response from him and it is curious that she does so, to say the least.

“I know it is. And I called because I wanted to ask about your message.”

He is tempted to smile, though he does not do so.

“It was not clear?”

“It was kind of-” He hears her pause, a particularly human trait as she chooses her next word. Her attention to her phrasing has always been something that he appreciates. “Brief.”

“It was?” he asks even as he makes a mental note to remember to include more text in his next message to her, even if he finds it superfluous. She has been invaluable in teaching him about human norms and customs, explaining details and and particulars in a way that even his mother never did and while up until this moment he was unaware that the concision of his messages was a problem, it is an easy one to rectify.

That he may have an opportunity to send her another one is alarmingly pleasing.

“Yeah. And I figured that you probably wanted a chance to talk at greater length for your thing for Desai.”

“Thing?” he echoes to his slight dismay. He is willing to adjust his message composition style but repeating such colloquialisms is illogical and not behavior he finds acceptable. 

“Your enormous intellectual crush on him. You keep wanting me to add more of his analysis into my paper.”

It is curious that even though she is discussing her work, her voice has taken on a tone that suggests she is smiling as she speaks. It is a specific quality that he would not have ever recognized or given much consideration to if he had not so often noticed how pleasant her expression became when she smiled and spoke at the same time. The image rises to his mind now and makes it more difficult than it should be to focus on academic matters.

“It would strengthen your argument and improve your chances that it would be published in an elite xenolinguistics scholarly journal,” he tells her, attempting to center his attention on the reason she called him instead of the memory of how her eyes brighten when she laughs.

“You’re sure it’s not just so that you can run into him at some conference and tell him about the time you got a student to cite him thirty times?”

It took him nearly the entirety of the summer to recognize her use of humor and that he is now able to do so is disproportionately enjoyable.

“Thirty would be superfluous and furthermore I believe he is retired.”

“Still,” she says, which is a wholly inadequate response. He finds that he has a far greater capacity for indulgence for such when it is Nyota uttering such irrational statements.

It is as gratifying as ever to discuss the intricacies of her paper and while he is not one to lose track of time, he does find that the conversation is shorter than he might have anticipated, or desired.

“So I’ll let you go, I’m sure that you’re busy,” she says.

“I had thought that you would be as well,” he replies, attempting to keep the disappointment that she does not have further questions regarding her paper from coloring his tone. 

“It’s not too bad.”

He does not know what that means. Humans are imprecise and often vague in their communication and even despite Nyota’s constant attention to word choice, he has often found himself stymied when attempting to deduce the implications behind what she says.

Now, the only significant result of what she said is that she has yet to hang up or to tell him goodbye. He recognizes that she does not have further issues to discuss regarding her paper and the fact that without that between them he will have no future reason to contact her prompts him to continue their discussion.

He debates a number of potential topics before settling on one that will afford her a cursory answer if she does indeed wish to terminate their call.

“How are your classes?”

“Fine,” she answers and at the abruptness of the answer he prepares himself to hear her bid him goodnight, when to his surprise she continues speaking. “Good, actually. I like my Cardassian class a lot.”

“Who is the instructor?” he prompts.

“Cretek.”

He finds himself nodding in approval before abruptly realizing he is doing so and he makes himself cease such action immediately. 

“I have heard she is quite popular.”

“I can see why.”

There is so much more that he wishes to speak to her about and it is difficult to select another question, especially as he does not know how long this opportunity to talk to her will last or if it will arise again in the near future, if at all.

“And the position for Advanced Morphology?” he finally asks, despite how difficult it is to decide what to ask next. “Is it enjoyable?”

“Yeah it’s…” she begins, before trailing off, a habit of hers that he has found illogical. Also charming. However in this instance it makes him wonder if he should have directed the conversation elsewhere, if this subject is not one she wishes to discuss. “Machesky’s teaching it, not Wyke.”

While he does not allow himself an utterance of surprise or any other outward reaction, it does not mean that he does not feel it. He has few colleagues who he finds as pleasant to work with as he does Wyke. Machesky is one of the only officers who have caused him to question Starfleet’s standards that he remains employed.

It would be improper to speak ill of a colleague, and especially when that individual is Nyota’s new supervisor. That does not mean that it is not difficult to respond neutrally.

“Is that so?” 

“He’s teaching it really differently than you did.”

Her disclosure is hardly unexpected and he refrains from voicing the discontentment that he feels rising in his throat.

“In what way?”

“Well I don’t think anyone’s terrified of him, so there’s that,” she tells him and he wonders as that very human ability to make light of an unpleasant situation. “Also his reading assignments are half as long.”

“I wished to be thorough.”

“I know. He’s having me change all of your materials.”

While that is hardly unforeseen, it does not render a logical way to use Nyota’s time. “Why?”

“No idea. He was out the other day so I got to teach the class. That was… it was pretty cool.”

“The temperature in the room was cold?” he asks and as he does so he cannot help but remember the slight weight of her hand on his arm, her fingers tracing lightly over his skin as she told him that his sense of humor was ‘weird’, a comment he found spurious at best. “You may have thought to raise it.”

“It’s times like these that make me realize how you got so far in your career with that big brain of yours,” she says and he has to work to keep his mouth from curling into a smile at the warmth in her tone. His urge to exhibit a physical response to her voice is immediately stayed by her next comment. “He said that, um, that it doesn’t matter where I submit my paper? That it’s all chance, anyway, if it gets published?”

“That is inaccurate,” he says firmly. He doubts that Nyota knows that the Lieutenant was forced to submit a paper on biolinguistics nearly a dozen times before it was accepted for publication.

The disparity in ranks between himself and Nyota makes it perhaps inappropriate to share such a fact, so he does not. He is as ever unclear of how to navigate the imbalance between their positions within Starfleet and it is not the first time that he has thought of how much simpler matters would be if they were both commissioned officers.

“Oh. Good. That’s, that’s good,” she says and he is satisfied that even without sharing that detail she is sufficiently assuaged of Machesky’s poor advice in the matter of her paper. “Ho asked me to go through the Romulan tutorial one last time. I didn’t realize that you had uploaded it.”

He had done so in the hour after he finished commenting on her paper, intending to complete the work they had done together so that she would not be forced to wait on him. 

“I assumed that you would be occupied with the beginning of the semester,” he explains, since he had not thought to inform her of that fact as he had not wished to distract her from her classes and the demands upon her schedule with unnecessary concerns. 

He might have been in error for assuming that seeking to help her in that way would be appreciated. He is not certain that it is distress that colors her tone, but he is also not certain that it is not.

“No, no, it’s fine. Of course. Thanks for, um- No, thanks, I’ve been busy. Definitely.”

In the silence that follows her indecisive response, he fully expects her to end the call. He does not know what was improper about uploading the tutorial and he does not know how to phrase a question that might avail him of an answer. 

He does not let himself sigh when she continues the conversation, but is relieved enough that he could.

“How’s space?” 

“I believe you took the required Introduction to Astrophysics course so you are able to answer that.”

“Very funny. And yes, I did. And got perfect marks, which of course you also know.” He does know that. Her transcript is unique enough that he has overheard a number of other instructors discuss her proficiency, and he was well aware of her academic success even before she was his student. “And fine, specifically how is the ship?”

“Excellent,” he answers. Her interest is exceptionally enjoyable.

“Where are you?”

“Currently in orbit over Neptune.”

“That’s not that far,” she says and he nods even though he tells himself not to. It is relatively near to Earth and he has more than once contemplated the relative proximity of their locations, a fact that has stood at odds with the silence that has existed between them until now. “Are you… are you on your way back already?”

“No,” he tells her and while wishing is illogical, he cannot help but desire to inform her of a different answer.

“Oh. Ok.”

He has many more questions to ask her, topics he would like to discuss and events that have happened since they last saw each other that he would like to relate, but he does not let himself as she is invariably occupied by her responsibilities to her work. Her unfailing devotion to such is a characteristic he very much admires and while he is of the opinion that humans perform best when they have taken adequate time to rest and pursue other activities as a way to refresh themselves, he would not seek to dissuade her from her obligations simply to continue speaking to him, no matter how inclined he is to continue their conversation.

“You have homework to attend to, I will not detain you further.”

“I do,” she says and even though he may have wanted her to deny the fact of her work, she is as ever an example of a most rational member of her species. “I’m glad that it sounds like things are going well.”

Compared to how it was before she called, his state is much improved. He wonders if the same holds true for her as well, though he does not have enough information to speculate.

“For you also.”

“It’s… Yeah, it’s good here. And it was good to talk to you, too.”

She has sufficiently established her expectation that he attempt to say goodbye in accordance with Terran custom. That he did not do so the last time they were in each others company he hopes she will excuse.

Then, he was unable to to even contemplate bidding farewell to her and even now, it is difficult enough to say, “Have a pleasant evening, Nyota.”

He attempts to collect himself to say something further, but the thought of the conversation drawing to a close is paradoxically enough to silence him, so instead of mustering the words to somehow continue their discussion, he’s simply folds his comm closed.

He holds it for a moment, despite the illogic of not simply setting it down.

He is unable to ascertain what it means that it was ‘good’ to talk to him. It is a vague term and could convey a variety of different connotations, all of which escape him and he cannot decide on how to best interpret it.

He does not know if they will speak again, or if they do when it might occur. He remains unclear as to her desire regarding the matter of further conversation or if this discussion paves the way for a second one in which he might call her. In all, no more is resolved than was before they spoke.

And yet, he feels comparably lighter, an odd sensation that he focuses on, examines, and dismisses.

He does not know what the future of their association holds, but he does decide that while he was uncertain if her request for a postcard was a serious one or said in jest, he no longer can be complicit in failing to even attempt to acquire one.

Puri will know. He has been engaged in a relationship with a human for the better part of a decade and has ample experience with illogical situations such as these.

It is not until he is halfway down the corridor that he realizes that he failed to put down his comm and that it remains in his hand. It is no matter. He will return it to its spot on his desk in short order, after he has sufficiently ascertained what precisely a postcard is and how to obtain one.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 4/8/15: What a yucky few weeks! Luckily my own papers are turned in so now I can get back to writing about Nyota and her papers :) We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of Nyota’s POV after this chapter as well as the story actually moving forward again, but in the meantime enjoy an extra-long chapter of Spock! I also didn’t say this last time, but these Spock chapters are in no way ‘canon’ in this story. I rather like the idea that he’s a smooth operator and is full of conviction and knows exactly what he’s doing and half of the time I think that’s just as accurate, if not more so, than this portrayal here. So feel free to disregard all of this if you want to!

"A what?" Puri asks.

"A postcard," Spock repeats.

"Did you ask Pike?"

"No."

"Can I call Arlene?"

"No."

"Computer," Puri says, pointing both antenna towards Spock in a manner that he assumes is intended to indicate annoyance. "Define 'postcard'."

"An antiquated card for sending a message by mail without an envelope, typically depicting a photograph or other illustration," the computer answers with its accompanying whistle.

"Envelope," Puri echoes. "Postcard. Computer, do you have the specifications to replicate one?"

"Negative," the computer answers at the same time that Spock does.

When the computer does not elaborate, he explains, "Chief Engineer Olson has yet to complete the repairs on the starboard gravimetric pulse transmitter and as such, the axial transference sequencer is offline."

"Sometimes when you talk, I can't understand you."

"The replicators are not operating at full capacity," he clarifies.

"No wonder you're dating a linguist," Puri says and while his voice is quiet enough that it might suggest Spock was not intended to hear his statement, prior evidence suggests otherwise. "Why do you need a postcard anyway? Can't this wait until we're home?"

"I assumed that you would know how to procure one."

"You're the genius," Puri says and once more pokes both antenna at Spock. "I'm supposed to be talking to my wife right now, not dabbling in Terran antiquities."

Spock does hesitate before nodding. It is evening in San Francisco and it should not have escaped his notice that Nyota's availability to call him likely echoes Arlene's own. Puri is in the habit of speaking to his wife daily, a practice that Spock is well accustomed to and one which he should not have overlooked.

It is no matter. He very much doubts that Nyota has any real material need for a postcard and if she does, she is fully capable of procuring one herself.

He is nearly halfway to his quarters when he feels Puri's hand on his shoulder.

"Let's go," Puri says and points an antennae towards the turbolift.

"You are otherwise occupied."

"We're leaving Neptune tomorrow morning, this is our only chance."

"There is no need."

"Of course there isn't, there couldn't possibly be a need for a postcard or otherwise you wouldn't have come banging on my door. And don't get one, I'll be in charge of bringing brilliant xenoling cadets souvenirs from halfway across the solar system."

"As I did not state the intended purpose behind acquiring-"

"And here I thought you were going to tell me that due to the current positions of Earth and Neptune we're only a third of the way across the system from each other."

"I would suggest that you spend more time studying star charts."

"You can put it in my review," Puri offers and Spock feels him squeeze his shoulder before he removes his hand. "And speaking of, did Pike tell you about this teenager he wants to hire? Some interstellar nav hotshot who's not even old enough to drive?"

While enlisting Puri's help means necessarily including him on this venture and subjects Spock to additional mentions of his desire to procure a gift for Nyota, the Doctor is at least efficient in determining where on the Federation outpost they might find such an item.

Spock cuts off what he predicts will be a fourth reference to his task by approaching the sales clerk in the small store they locate.

"We require a postcard," he informs the young human behind the counter.

"A really good, extra special postcard," Puri adds, leaning against the counter and smiling.

Spock has repeatedly heard descriptors of the Doctor which include words such as 'disarming' and 'charming' and has watched him elicit responses of abject delight from a series of women. He is therefore unsurprised by the flush that spreads across the adolescent's cheeks or the way in which she returns his smile.

"We have those," she says and gestures towards the back of the store. Her flush darkens slightly as she smiles at Spock as well, an expression that he does not return.

"She likes you," Puri whispers as they approach the rack of rectangular, paper cards depicting various images of both Neptune as well as the station in orbit around it.

"Desist, please."

"No wonder it took you all of five minutes to get a new girlfriend," Puri says as he selects a postcard to examine.

"That is incorrect.”

"Twelve minutes, then. Fifteen point four."

Spock entertains the notion of responding, contemplating a number of factual statements he could make in rejoinder, and rejects each in turn. Instead, he chooses a postcard to study, one of Neptune half-lit by Earth's sun.

"Sorry," Puri says at length, as Spock’s silence endures. 

"There is nothing to apologize for."

"I didn't mean to bring up you know, everything.”

“Your phrasing is ambiguous, at best,” Spock informs him, examining a number of choices before replacing them and removing yet another one to scrutinize. 

“I meant that-”

"I am uncertain of how to make a selection,” Spock states in a manner slightly more abrupt than he intended.

"Something to convey that this is one of the more unusual Terran customs that either one of us have stumbled across?" Puri asks as he inspects two, one held in each hand.

"That is untrue,” Spock says, gratified for the change in subject. “You were obligated to procure a metastable allotrope of carbon."

"That joke would be funnier if you hadn't used it so much while we were shopping for Arlene's ring."

While Spock does not condone judging another culture's customs unfavorably, it does not prevent him from finding the gift of precious gems as a means to ratify an agreement regarding matrimony logical by any means. 

"As it is not a joke, your statement is-"

"Inaccurate. Fallacious. Erroneous. Keep it up and I'm going to be forced to remind you that it is incredibly, extraordinarily, and unbelievably serendipitous that we went through that already, so that when it's your turn, we'll actually know what to do and won't have to call your mom again."

He dismisses the immediate thought that in order to draw on such an experience, it would necessitate him forming a connection of such kind with a human. The fact that he has yet to even engage in a romantic, monogamous relationship with a Terran is not lost upon him, nor is the fact that he finds simply procuring a satisfactory postcard sufficiently challenging without contemplating such complex future proceedings.

He does not know which one Nyota would prefer, nor is he certain that she wants one at all as it would not be the first time she made a statement in one situation and yet meant something entirely different. The logical course of action would be to have more thoroughly researched this custom, asked a human for help, and better ascertained her actual desire to receive one as well as her preferred specifications. However, in acknowledging this he is forced to recognize that if he is to contemplate recent endeavors he has undertaken without thoroughly identifying and then adhering to a logical path, then he must include other aspects of his relationship with Nyota beyond simply her wish - or potential lack thereof - for a postcard. His reflections on the evolution of their relationship are becoming increasingly frequent and increasingly difficult to dismiss, as is the concern over what events will occur upon his return. 

Vulcans are predisposed to having carefully crafted intentions and he is unclear why developing a plan for how to interact with Nyota in the future is so difficult. He is only certain of the fact that he will likely see her again due to being in close proximity on the Academy’s campus, but is unable to determine the probability that she will be willing or likely to interact with him in a positive manner. He anticipates that it is as possible, if not more so, that she will be as aloof as she was at times over the summer.

He is certain that a postcard could impact the course of events in either way, though exactly how is debatable. It is conceivable that receiving it would cause her to respond with a smile, which might precede a conversation the likes of which he has typically enjoyed with her, which might then lead to another conversation at a later date or perhaps a more formal opportunity for social interactions. It is also possible that she does not wish to actually receive a postcard and presenting her with one could cause her irritation. However, failing to procure one could cause her distress if she does in fact have need of such an item, or perhaps relief if she was worried that he might take her nonchalant request seriously.

It would have been logical to simply ask her to clarify her wishes and failing to do so was a gross oversight, which is perhaps in part excused by the unexpected nature of his departure, though not entirely.

"Spock?" Puri asks. "Can I tell you something?"

Spock quickly replaces the postcard he was holding and retrieves a different one.

"I assume that I will be unable to dissuade you from doing so no matter my answer."

"What I said before..." Puri begins, then pauses for no discernible reason before continuing. "I think that I am a bit surprised that you're even dating right now."

Spock is not dating right now, a fact that he could make clear. Dishonesty through omission is just as illogical as making a false statement. However, despite that fact he is as unable now as he has been for months to decide how best to broach the topic with Puri.

Nyota would be able to, he is certain.

"I didn't say that I didn't think it was a good idea," Puri continues.

"Double negatives are illogical."

"I just mean that I'm happy for you because she must really be worth it."

While Spock is certain that a suitable response exists, he is entirely uncertain what it might be.

As ever, Puri is discerning enough to notice his silence. Nyota is similarly astute, a trait that he laments in them both.

"You don't talk about her very much," Puri says.

"This is not the first time you have intimated such," he finally says, turning the postcard he is holding over so that he is able to examine the blank, white backing.

"I've made you listen to me go on and on about Arlene for years now."

"That is accurate."

"Arlene thinks it's cute, you know, that you don't have much to say about it. That it's pretty serious, then, between you too."

"Is that so?" Spock asks as he continues to study the back of the postcard.

"Humans, right?" Puri asks and Spock is certain that if he looked at the Doctor right then, he would be shrugging. "Don't know how she reached that conclusion. And I was going to ask but then she wanted to know what I tell you about her, if you don't say anything about Uhura, and I had to change the subject."

"Discretion is logical," Spock says, not for the first time, as Puri has habitually divulged details regarding his relationship that Spock has not always desired to be privy to.

"Well then, in that case I won't tell you what Arlene told me that she and Uhura talked about while they were driving back when you were coating yourself in coolant," Puri says. "Or how worried Uhura apparently was in the hospital. Arlene said it was adorable."

"That is untrue," Spock corrects as Nyota had quite clearly not been anxious, but rather exceptionally irritated, both with him as well as his need for her assistance.

Though he dismisses such thoughts when they occur, he has found himself remembering more often than he wishes to the soft touch of her hands. It is perhaps explainable in the moments before truly waking, or when he is nearing sleep that his mind drifts to recollections of their sexual encounters. It is less acceptable when he remembers her wrapping the bandage around his arm and hand, and the particular attention and concentration she gave to the task.

It is irrelevant and such memories are unproductive. Nyota is a Starfleet cadet and as such, assisting those in need of help is part of the expectations of her position. She was doing what any member of Starfleet would do, as is required of her.

Focusing on that fact helps to dispel the recollection of entering his sitting room to find her on his sofa, curled on one edge of it and far more relaxed in sleep than he had ever seen her while awake. So too does reminding himself of her obligations to Starfleet aid him in clearing his mind of the memory of her hand resting on his shoulder in the hospital, the quiet presence of her company as they ate dinner in his apartment, and above all her indignation on behalf of her roommate.

He has since pondered whether she fully understands the way in which her roommate assignment is a reflection of the quality of her own character, which is as important to the advancement of her career as any academic scores could be.

He perhaps should have articulated that more clearly, which he can remedy if he finds her willing to converse with him upon his return. It would, perhaps, help to dispel some of her anxiety over her grades. He assumes that she is currently, steadfastly committed to achieving top scores in her classes, no matter the difficulty that poses. While he predicts that in all likelihood she will succeed in such an endeavor, he would welcome the opportunity to impress upon her the ways in which her career will not be dependent upon her academic performance but instead the caliber of her interpersonal relations and interactions, in which she has already shown more promise than the majority of other cadets he has met. 

Many cadets have achieved top scores in their classes, but only one was selected to be the roommate of an Orion, and even fewer would have met such a revelation of the process behind such a decision with indignation on behalf of a friend.

Spock continues to study the rack of postcards in front of him and does not look over at Puri. "She is."

"She is what?"

He does not know if they will speak again when he returns, or how she perceives him, or if she even truly wants a postcard, but none of those facts stop him from selecting yet another one to examine.

"She is worth it."

He is certain that Puri is nodding, though he does not deem it necessary to turn in order to confirm that fact.

"I'm going to get that one too," Puri says.

"You are purchasing one as well? Explain."

"It's great, Arlene will love it."

"Please do not do so."

"I need the brownie points."

"I do not know what those are."

"Me neither, but Arlene tells me they're important," Puri says as he takes the postcard Spock is holding from his hand and selects a second identical one.

"Can you tell us something?" Puri asks the sales clerk, leaning on the counter once more and tapping the postcards lightly against it. "If you were married to me and dating him, would this be the postcard that you would want?"

The young woman bites her lower lip and nods, her eyes moving quickly towards Spock and then away again.

Spock would prefer to have an answer as to whether she would be amenable to receiving that particular postcard if she were not dating him but instead had formerly been pretending to and now is merely a colleague of grossly unequal rank in the same organization, but predicts that ascertaining such would be an exercise in futility.

In lieu of such, he examines the postcard one final time as he pays for it, unsure of what to do now that he has acquired it. He supposes that it is somehow appropriate that he is as uncertain as to the proper course of action in regards to the postcard as he is with the future of his interactions with Nyota, as illogical as that fact is.

…

To categorize finding Nyota's ID on the small screen of his comm as unexpected would be an understatement. It would also be illogical to admit that as he had taken to studying the postcard where it sits on his desk and as such, he has the distinct certainty that by thinking about her he has somehow prompted her to call him.

"Hey," she says when he answers and he finds that he is unable to fully understand the informality of her greeting. The familiarity in her voice is unexpected, but not unwelcome.

"Hello," he responds and though he attempts to stop himself from doing so, finds that he glances at the postcard yet again.

"Do you have a second?"

It is perhaps advantageous that she frames her call in such a manner so that he does not assume that they will speak for any length of time. The regret of this fact mixes with the surprise of her call, and he dismisses both responses as best as he is able.

"Just one?" he asks and finds himself wishing - illogically - that he was in her presence or at least speaking over the monitor so that he could ascertain whether or not she smiles in response.

He is on a starship which left the bounds of Earth's system yesterday afternoon. It is useless to long to be nearer to her as he has no power to achieve such.

"I meant, do you have a chance to talk in between your incredibly important job of taking the flagship out for an interstellar spin?"

"It important," he informs her, and due to the flippancy of her question he increases the likelihood that she is indeed smiling. It is an inordinately agreeable thought.

"Is Pike letting McKenna and Olson do donuts out past Pluto?"

"Donuts are easily replicable in the mess hall. I do not know why they would seek the Captain's approval before procuring them for themselves," he says and cannot keep himself from remembering the meals that he shared with her in the Academy cafeteria. He in uncertain as to whether the fact of her call might signify that they might do so again, or if this event and such future circumstances are unrelated. He could ask. It would be logical to do so. 

"Remind me to take you and that car of yours out to some parking lot sometime," she says.

He briefly considers notifying her that she is being overly incomprehensible, by inexplicably calling him twice and now suggesting yet another activity and resolves to ask for an explanation of what has caused this behavior, as well as what she specifically intends to do with his car, whether she actually wants him to bring her the postcard, and whether he might see her socially upon his return.

"If I inform you of anything, it is that donuts are a particularly unhealthy food choice," he says instead.

"Have you ever tried them?"

"No," he tells her. Her fixation with his food preferences is illogical, though he doubts that continuing to alert her to this fact will at all dissuade her from giving her opinion. He finds her conviction in her beliefs commendable, no matter that she has seemingly endless comments regarding his meals.

"That's a shame. I called to ask you about the Romulan tutorial but instead I'm going to recommend that you should really consider trying a donut."

"I will take that under advisement," he tells her. Perhaps, when he returns he can ask her for further counsel. If she is amenable. Which she might be, as she has called him yet again, except for the fact that she has done so regarding a professional task. That they have yet to begin discussing it is not something he understands, though it is perhaps accurate to acknowledge that he understands little of their interactions to begin with.

"Is there a problem with the tutorial?" he asks as it would be illogical for her to have called except to discuss her stated purpose. He still has yet to understand exactly what he did that was inappropriate in uploading it to the department's servers before he left, not that he has not dwelled on a number of possibilities, each as unlikely to be the truth as the rest.

"With all of them. These are incomprehensible, they should really be redesigned."

He allows his forehead to crease before realizing he has done so and immediately smoothing his expression.

"I did redesign them."

"Oh," she says and he finds himself, as ever, unable to predict what she might say next. "Well you did a pretty terrible job."

That was especially unexpected, though while her statement is overly harsh, her tone does not convey a similar sentiment.

That he can recognize that is more pleasing than is necessary.

"I did not."

"No, you did. These are atrocious. What was wrong with how they were?"

"The files were occupying substantial space on our servers and there was not capacity to update them without greatly reducing their processing speed," he explains. If she were Vulcan, she would see the inherent logic in his solution.

If she were Vulcan, he would not be wondering if she is currently smiling. 

"Still. This is not better."

"It is," he corrects and finds that he has reached for his padd as if she is next to him and he can call up the appropriate files to show her.

She is on Earth. He is no more able to point to a document on his padd in that moment than he is able to look at her.

"It is not," she says and he can discern a note of conviction in her voice before she groans in a manner that suggests abject exasperation. It is not the first time that he has heard such a sound from her and he cannot help but remember the way in which she typically closes her eyes and tilts her head to the side, which lengthens the line of her neck. "Spock! You removed all of my colloquialisms."

"Yours?" he asks as he sets his padd to the side, pushing it towards the edge of his desk until it is neatly and precisely aligned with the edge.

"I did them with Lieutenant Commander Haught last summer. For each and every language, all of the idioms and phrases and turns of expression that are helpful to know. Do you have any idea how long those took?"

He does, which is only due to the inordinate amount of time that they spent engaged in similar pursuits over the summer. He has never worked so closely with anyone, not Captain Pike, nor Puri, nor Lieutenant Rand or any of his other colleagues as circumstances have generally allowed him to conduct necessary tasks in the privacy of his quarters or office. While the adjustment of working with her in person had not been welcome at the time, he is now fully accustomed to working on a project together with her, even if they are doing so over the comm as opposed to sitting at the same table.

"Based upon the rate at which you typically complete projects I can surmise-"

"Did you delete them?" she interrupts, displaying a familiarity with him that few humans ever have. "I cannot believe you."

"I might take this opportunity to redirect your ire towards Commander Ho," he says and finds that he has picked up his padd again and has accessed the memory files that he has yet to delete. It was a project he undertook months ago, before Nyota had even distinguished herself in his class as being among the top students, but he has not needed to free additional space on his padd since then and as he expected, the files are still there. He could send them to her, or add them to the tutorial again without taking any more of her time.

Or perhaps it would be advantageous to show her how to add the data files herself. She had been so irritated that he had uploaded the tutorial without her that it might be the most logical course of action, so that he does not incur more of her displeasure.

It would also necessitate time spent in each others’ company. If she is willing. Or even wishes to learn such a technique, which she very likely may not.

"Nuh-uh," she says, another informal utterance that she would never have utilized in conversation with him at the inception of their arrangement. "Nice try."

"It was her-"

"Excuses," she says. "Don't want to hear it."

"Perhaps if you you send me your recommendations I will review possibilities to reprogram the tutorials and forward them on to the Commander for consideration," he offers. Such a situation would very likely lead to her being assigned to work with him on the project, which would be invaluable experience for her as it directly relates to work that she is likely to undertake once she has earned her commission.

That she pauses is concerning.

Understandable as well. She is overly absorbed in her own work and likely unwilling to undertake yet another task.

Or perhaps despite the familiarity of their conversation, it is not that she does not wish to work on the tutorials, but she does not wish to do so with him.

He glances at the postcard, and then away again.

A second call does not mean anything. She has questions regarding the tutorial and he is doubtful that there is any further significance. It was inappropriate to offer to work with her on yet another project and he will refrain from doing so in the future.

"Sure," she says.

He does not let himself sigh. Yet, her response holds no acquiescence to another project with him, nor an acknowledgement that she would be inclined to such. However, it is also not a rejection. 

As ever, the only conclusion that he is able to come to is that he is unclear as to her wishes.

It is not the first time he has questioned whether such perplexity is simply an inevitability when interacting with humans, nor the first time that he has deemed that to likely be the case, as evidenced from his father's difficulty finding the logic in his mother's actions, or Puri's considerable and persistent confusion regarding certain interactions with Arlene.

Both his father and Puri are in the habit of seeking clarification.

Of course, the other similarity between them is that they are engaged in an established and enduring relationship with a human and Spock is not.

Not only are he and Nyota not dating and he is uncertain as to what her response meant, or why she called, or whether or not she truly wants a postcard, he is also unable to decide what to say next, much to his frustration. 

He would think that it should not be this difficult, except that his father and Puri's examples have sufficiently demonstrated otherwise.

She is similarly silent, so he accepts that she is likely waiting to see if he will remember to actually articulate a farewell.

He will, as he would be remiss in forgoing such. He simply does not wish to do so until he is absolutely certain that he is unable to find a topic to prolong the conversation.

"If you don't get back soon, there's going to be a whole host of cadets speaking Romulan better than you do."

The relief he feels at the continuation of their discussion is palpable, if an inappropriate overly emotional response. "Apparently not with the quality of the programming of the tutorials."

"Tell me about it."

"Tell you what about it?" he asks and finds himself again unable to keep himself from picturing her smile. Her potential smile, if that is in fact her reaction, not that he can ascertain either way without being able to see her.

"Nothing, no- Oh stop, you know what I mean," she says.

He does, and perhaps should have not prevaricated, but from her voice she does not seem overly concerned. If he could only see her, he could be more certain of that fact.

"Before I let you go-" she begins and he finds himself interrupting her in his haste to delay the termination of their conversation.

"Are you currently occupied?" Such a question is illogical and not something he should allow himself. She is a third year cadet, she is nearly always occupied. She was also attempting to end their call and he should let her do so. Despite the fact that he is wholly uncertain that there will be a third communication, but that should not cause him to prevent her from hanging up. She is busy. Or simply does not wish to speak with him further.

"Yes. No," she says and her equivocation should be illogical, not endearing. "But you know Kirk? He wants me to take this training sim with him, this test?"

"Is that a question?" he asks, in part because he is genuinely unclear but also to protract their conversation. It is illogical. The number of irrational occurrences that have happened since he answered his call will merit significant meditation on his part when he is afforded the chance.

"Very funny. I just wanted to know if you thought... I don't think many of my friends have ever done it. I was just wondering if you'd heard of it? The Kobayashi Maru?"

He has had difficulty fully understanding the human notion of irony in the past, but he supposes that the fact that he wishes to extend their conversation and she has picked the one topic he is unable to speak about would qualify.

"I have.”

"Kirk said it was something that fourth years take but I was just... I wanted to know what you thought."

He supposes that it is even more ironic that Nyota has willfully disregarded all previous advice that he has offered her, only to seek out his opinion on this topic.

There are very few statements that he can make that will both uphold the necessary secrecy surrounding the simulation, as well as which will be factually accurate and it takes him longer than is necessary to choose the most suitable one.

"My initial reaction is to inform you that you are not a fourth year student."

"See, Spock, that's why they say that Vulcans are so smart. I'm continually impressed by your brilliance."

"Truly?" he asks and cannot help but wish that the levity in her voice predicates a change of subject.

"No."

"I am not able to offer you any advice on the matter," he tells her and while it is illogical to wish for different circumstances, he finds that he cannot keep himself from doing so. Had they met later in her career, this would not be an issue, or if he too were a student, or if Kirk had not apparently broached the topic with her, or if Nyota had dismissed the idea of participating instead of contemplating it further.

A scenario where Nyota did not approach him for advice is not one that he allows himself to ponder. He prefers that while he is unclear as to the exact parameters of their relationship, or their future together, that she considers him a source of information in such matters, no matter that he is unable to help. If he had not agreed to their arrangement, if she had not proposed it in the first place, if Pike had tasked Olson with negotiating for the crystals instead of himself, if Carrick had not transferred, this would not now be occurring.

He may wish to have a deeper and more fully formed relationship with her, but there are a multitude of possibilities where they would not even be speaking now, let alone have spent the summer in each other’s company.

"Ok, of course. I wasn't-" she begins before stopping mid-sentence.

She does not continue to explicate what she was not going to do, so he finally continues so that the silence between them does not persist.

"Commissioned officers are not permitted to discuss the details of such trainings," he says by way of further explanation.

"No, I get it, that makes sense," she responds, much to his gratification. For all of her irrational human behavior, she is still one of the most logical members of her species he has met, in this matter as much as in others.

He is inclined to ask how certain she is that she will participate, as he wishes to ascertain the likelihood that the test will even take place.

If the concept of irony is a purely human one, then so too is what his mother would often say about silver linings. There is a substantial probability that if Kirk does decide to take the simulation - an occurrence Spock does not condone as if any cadet is unready for such a test, Kirk is foremost among them - Spock will be required to be in attendance. Pike will also very likely wish to observe, as he is quite partial to the cadet, which increases the chance that the Enterprise will return to Earth. 

Rand is quite capable of running the program without him. It is not strictly necessary that he be there. The fact that she is so adept at her job is normally quite pleasing and yet that fact now amounts to a certain annoyance that he is not absolutely needed to return to the Academy.

"When is the test scheduled to take place?" he asks as in all likelihood, his return will depend upon it not being planned in the immediate future.

Also he wishes to discern her desire to help Cadet Kirk. Which is immaterial. And illogical. And not information that he needs.

"Tuesday."

"It is currently Tuesday," he informs her, a small knot forming in his stomach at the thought that the simulation could be so immediate.

"Next Tuesday, I meant," she says and it sounds like she very likely could be smiling. "But you're such a genius, I'm telling you. No wonder you graduated at the top of your class. Is knowing the date a skill that all exemplary officers are supposed to possess?"

"Indeed," he says and is optimistic that her comment signifies a change in topic, to one that he perhaps can speak of at greater length.

Of course, he is again unable to identify what that topic might be. The liveliness in her voice leads him to believe that such an effort will not be in vain and yet despite that confidence he finds himself unable to determine what precisely she would like to discuss with him, or what she might find interesting enough to speak to him about at any length. He always found the occasions of their extended discussions over the summer unpredictable, both because he could not anticipate when they would occur nor the reason that they did and as such, he has yet to determine the factors that precipitated them nor how to recreate those circumstances.

As such, he is still contemplating various avenues of discussion when she speaks.

"When do you think you'll be back?"

He considers informing her that she has very recently developed a particular talent for identifying topics he cannot discuss. He would do so, but then he would have to explain why he cannot talk about the test, nor the way in which it factors into his return journey.

After she completes the simulation, he can tell her. If she wishes to speak to him then, he can recount this conversation and perhaps will be able to do so in a way that she will find amusing. 

"Perhaps this week or next," he finally answers after deciding that it is as accurate an answer as he can provide.

"Oh, really? That soon?"

"I may have a number of commitments to return to and I believe that Captain Pike will be eager to be back as well," he says, which is factual, though perhaps omits the truth of the matter. A cultural disinclination towards lying is rather bothersome when considering interactions with humans and all the complexity they necessitate. It would be a matter to bring before the ethics committee of the High Council, though he predicts that their solution would be to cease associations with such irrational species.

"Are you going to tell me all about your trip?"

He nods, despite himself. This is, finally, a topic on which he can elucidate and the fact that she wishes to hear about what he has been doing is delightful.

Logical, he corrects himself. She is a cadet, she is very likely interested in the activities occurring on the flagship.

"What would you like to know?"

"No, not right now, I'm busy," she says and the warmth that has taken residence in his chest dissipates. 

It is no matter. It was a psychosomatic response to happiness and it is fortunate that it is gone.

"Ah, pardon."

"No, no I meant-"

"You are occupied," he says and again, he finds himself nodding. It is an effort to make himself stop. 

Her dedication to her studies is admirable and as she has likely postponed her homework for too long already in speaking with him, he will not detain her further.

"I'm- it's just the tutorial, really, it's not- But if you have work to get to-"

"I do not wish to delay you."

"Yeah, thanks," she says and he attempts to find an amount of pleasure in her gratitude. "Ok. Goodnight, then."

A curious statement, to be sure. Illogical, too, more so for the fact that he finds it rather charming. "It is evening."

"Right. Well. It won't be forever."

"Pardon?"

"Nothing, don't... Bye. Uh, goodbye. Talk to you later. When you get back, I mean."

That is the most clear and unambiguous statement she has made in that regard and he realizes only after doing so that he has unintentionally leaned closer to his comm. 

"I will speak with you then," he confirms.

"Great, yeah..." she says and he is about to ask for further clarification on when their conversation might occur, or where, and whether it will be in a professional or personal capacity, and furthermore if she truly does wish to obtain a postcard, but then she says, "Bye," and it is followed by the termination of their call.

It is no matter. She said that they would speak again and though the parameters of such are unclear, that is more certainty as to the future of their interactions than he has otherwise had up until this point.

He looks at the postcard one more time before standing and going in search of Pike, so that he can ascertain when, precisely, they will be back on Earth.

“Cadet Kirk intends to take the Kobayashi Maru,” Spock says as soon as he locates the Captain in the mess hall and joins Pike and Puri at the table they are eating dinner at.

“I heard,” the Captain says as he takes a bite of his sandwich. “Can’t wait to watch it.”

“We will be returning in time?”

“Yep.”

No further comment from the Captain is forthcoming, which Spock finds exceptionally dissatisfactory, no matter how pleased he is to learn that they will, in fact, be present.

“Kirk is in his second year at the Academy.”

“I know.”

“It is a simulation that is typically available only to fourth year students.”

“Right you are.”

“Clearly there is a discrepancy if-“

“I told him to take it.”

Spock considers several possible reasons before deciding that there are none that approach even a measure of logic. “Explain.”

“Wanted to knock him down a few pegs.”

“You are aware that by doing so you are subjecting other students to-“

“Knew it,” Pike says and smiles around the bite of sandwich he just took. “He asked Uhura, didn’t he?”

It takes Spock longer than is acceptable to formulate a response. “I suppose that you advised him in his crew selection as well.”

“I told him that if he wanted to take it, he needed to get the best bridge crew together that he could,” Pike says and lifts one shoulder towards his ear.

“It is illogical to presume that Cadet Kirk is able to withstand the rigors of such a simulation so early in his training.”

“That’s the point, Spock,” the Captain says before taking another large bite of his sandwich.

“And yet you are willing to expose his classmates to the obligatory drop in their scores that accompany this specific examination?”

“That’s cold, Pike,” Puri says, shaking both his head and antenna. “Spock’s right, you’re setting him up to crash and burn, and the rest of his buddies too.”

Pike only nods and continues to consume his dinner.

Spock finds such nonchalance unacceptable.

“There is no logical reason to-“

“C’mon, Spock,” Pike says, putting his sandwich on his plate. “You’re the one who’s always saying that Kirk is too big for his britches.”

“I have said no such thing.”

“The kid needs to learn some humility, I totally agree. Consider this a result of all the times you’ve told me that and just be happy that I listened to you.”

“Suggesting to him that he is able to undertake such an advanced simulation will only serve to inflate the very ego that I have repeatedly-“

“Sought to deflate, I got you, loud and clear the first ten times you complained about him. But I think you’re wrong about this one.”

“I am not.”

Pike shrugs again, then puts the remainder of his sandwich in his mouth and speaks around it. “We’ll see.”

Puri turns to Spock upon the Captain’s departure from the mess hall with a small smile that causes Spock to turn his attention to his meal and immediately begin considering options to avoid whatever comment the Doctor is preparing to make.

“Imagine that, a young cadet who has complete confidence in himself attempting the Kobayashi Maru,” Puri says and when Spock hazards a glance at him, his smile has grown wider. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you’re trying to protect Kirk from utter and complete failure as a result of your own experience.”

“It is fortunate, then, that you do know better.”

“I admit, I’m a bit excited to see what your test will do to him.”

Spock puts his fork down with more force than is strictly necessary. “It is illogical to-“

“C’mon, Spock, Uhura’ll be fine,” Puri says as if Spock had not spoken. “It’s brutal and there’s something slightly morbid about how hard you’ve made it since you started programming it, but we’ve all been there and she’ll do great, you know that.”

“By the nature of the test, she will not.”

“Well, ok, yes. None of them will. But I’m sure she’ll be able to handle herself.”

His certainty that Puri is correct that Nyota will perform admirably does not temper the disquiet that has arisen since their phone call. He can recognize that in part his unease stems from the fact that despite the fact she called him, he is as unclear as to her feelings regarding him as ever, but also that the fact that she is very likely going to take the Kobayashi Maru puts into perspective the disparity in their ranks and positions in Starfleet in a way that is unsettling.

It is not that he is unaware of the fact that she is a student, but rather that without the Academy being in session and the quieter atmosphere of campus in the summer months, and in addition to the fact that they were working on her paper and as her advisor he had fewer of the professional obligations of being her professor, the reality of her rank in comparison to his own was not perhaps immaterial, but far less significant than it could have been.

“It is simply that-“ he begins, then is forced to stop as his concerns are far from simple.

As Puri habitually does when Spock pauses to choses how best to articulate his thoughts, the Doctor effortlessly expresses them for him.

“It is simply that it’s hard that after a fantastic summer, you’re going to get back to Earth and have to deal with the fact that you’re a senior officer and to boot, she’s undertaking one of the only experiences at Starfleet that you can’t talk to her about, and even worse than that, you have a hand in how difficult the test is going to be for her.”

In the silence that follows, Spock is aware that Puri is giving him the opportunity to dispute any of those assertions and while he did not perhaps find the summer to be ‘fantastic’, it seems overly pedantic to argue the point.

“Also,” Puri continues when Spock does not speak. “You happen to remember how hard it was when I kept asking Arlene about the test and she wouldn’t say anything.” Puri pauses again and when Spock looks at him, the other man has a small smile, the type of which he normally exhibits when he is recalling the early years of his relationship. “Remember how I thought we were breaking up? Because she just kept avoiding the topic and then me all together?”

“I do.”

“Ah, well, I think Uhura is slightly saner than I was, you two won’t have that problem.”

They will not have that problem as it would be impossible to end a relationship that does not exist.

She said that they would speak when he returned, a sentiment that he repeats to himself now.

He recognizes, though he does not wish to, the inherent illogic in the entire situation. On Vulcan, he would simply inform her that he has developed a singular interest in her and would be amenable to undertaking an exclusive, romantic relationship. 

Of course, on Vulcan he was bonded at the age of seven to an unsuitable match and on Vulcan, even if he did approach a woman with such a proposal, if they found it unacceptable they would plainly state so. 

Such a refusal is an occurrence with Nyota that he would prefer to avoid at all costs.

It is not lost on him that the mess hall is particularly empty this evening and that Puri is the only other individual within close proximity and as such, Spock could ask him for advice on how, precisely, to bring about the conversation Nyota had intimated would occur, and what the best way to approach it would be to ensure success. 

However, even without the necessary disclosure as to the true status of his and Nyota’s relationship, inducing such an interaction will necessarily have to be delayed, as Puri’s comment reinforces. Due to her interest in the Kobayashi Maru, it would be unwise to place himself in a position where the topic might be raised again and as well as he knows Nyota, it is invariable that she will wish to discuss it due to her meticulous attention to her academic standings.

“Spock,” Puri says and Spock looks up from his plate to find the Doctor both looking at him as well as pointing both antennae squarely in his direction. “The fact that you get quiet and stare into space whenever the subject of one Cadet Nyota Uhura is raised is as annoying as it is cute. Cut it out.”

“It is impossible to be looking at space due to the opacity of not only the table, but the structure of the ship around us.”

“I’m sometimes amazed that the ladies don’t trip over themselves trying to get to you,” Puri says as he resumes his meal.

As he is laying in bed that evening, his thoughts return to Nyota as they invariably tend to do. It is not the first time that he has attempted to change the subject of his contemplation and it is similarly not the first time that he has found it difficult to do so and now, in his endeavor to not linger over the apprehension that a return to Earth stirs and all the associated unknowns that he will have to face in his relationship or lack thereof with Nyota, he finds that the only other line of thought that readily springs to mind is the memory of the occasions she spent the night at his apartment and the sight of her in the morning, sleeping in the disheveled bedding.

It takes him longer than is acceptable to fall asleep.

…

The habit of Starfleet to reassign staff to the Academy not in accordance with the academic year but rather the schedule of ships is necessary, but that does not render it undemanding of officers who serve both as instructors and officers in the greater fleet. As such, he is required to be in contact with the instructors whose classes he is acquiring while also maintaining contact with Lieutenant Rand as she readies the Kobayashi Maru, as well as attend to his duties aboard the Enterprise.

The only benefit of the increased demands upon his schedule is that he is necessarily unable to spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the future of his interactions with Nyota. That does not mean, however, that his thoughts do not stray towards the topic more than is desirable.

Much to his frustration as the ship draws nearer to Earth, his anxiety regarding seeing her again increases to the degree to which it is difficult to dismiss. 

He supposes that it may very well be a human condition to suffer from a certain amount of restlessness when returning from a prolonged absence, as his crew mates display a curious combination of excitement regarding their imminent return and regret that they cannot remain on the ship longer. Even Puri spends their final shift on the bridge rather than in Sickbay, standing near Pike’s chair and watching Earth approach in the view screen as he alternatively talks about being reunited with Arlene while also lamenting being planetside again.

It is an ambivalence that quickly disappears when Arlene is there to meet them

It is not the first time that Spock has been forced to endure the occasion of their enthusiastic greeting and that it is as avid now as it has been for the entirety of their relationship is quite probably a testament to the strength of the connection between them.

That he finds himself slightly nettled by the sight is something he represses. He is, as ever, pleased that Puri has cultivated such a satisfying relationship with Arlene, which is a fact that he reminds himself of as he offers her a perfunctory greeting and leaves them so that he can depart from the shuttle bay as quickly as possible.

It is only when he steps outside into the cold but bright sunshine that he realizes that with such an abrupt departure, he has not fully decided on his next course of action. He had left the majority of his belongings in his quarters on the ship, and as such has no need to return to his quarters as he is only holding a few personal effects. He could visit the Computer Sciences Department and find which office he has been assigned to, or seek out Lieutenant Rand, or simply proceed to the simulation room and begin his work there without her.

Or he could go to the Xenolinguistics Department as his first order of business.

It is logical. He must retrieve a number of texts for his new classes, ones that he has been storing in his office.

He is overly aware of his surroundings as he walks there, which is illogical not only for the fact that there is no need to be so attentive to a location that he has spent so much time in both as a student and an instructor, but also that the student body is sufficiently large enough to render the statistical likelihood that he encounter any specific individual on the walk from the shuttle bay to his office negligible.

Furthermore, Nyota is most likely occupied, with class or her work, as she has repeatedly stated that she undertakes few other activities.

Except that she was in the tutorial lab when she called him and she is serving as Machesky’s Teaching Assistant.

It is of no matter. It is illogical to spend an inordinate amount of time on such thoughts.

However, that fact does not prevent him from being far more conscious of who is in the turbo lift and corridors of the building than he might otherwise be.

His office is slightly disturbed by the construction over the summer and he takes the opportunity to readjust the objects on his desk in a more orderly manner. When he is finished, he sets his padd and comm where he typically does, which leaves him holding the postcard and contemplating what exactly to do with it.

It would be logical to simply give it to her the next time he sees her, but now that he is back on Earth, that reality is possible in a way that it was not on the ship, and he is stymied at how to actually carry out such a task. He is unclear if he should carry it with him at all times as he is not certain when he will see her next, or what to do if he encounters her but it is not on his person. Or, what would be proper if he does have it but when he sees her she is in the company of either her friends or other students or officers. He supposes that he could initiate contact with her and request that she come to his office, but that has the impression of a formality that he is unsure this object necessitates, which then gives rise to the fact that he could very well invite her to his quarters and give it to her there, but that is then perhaps more personal than is appropriate.

He will call his mother, he decides, then immediately rejects that idea. It would be too difficult to explain.

He can ask Puri, though he is certain that the Doctor would not wish to be disturbed at this juncture.

Nyota has repeatedly encouraged him to develop a more personal relationship with the Captain, and yet approaching him over such a situation as this is not something that Spock wishes to even contemplate.

The fact that Nyota is the best candidate to ask for advice on this matter is not lost on him.

He sets the postcard on the edge of his desk, then moves it so that it is parallel with his padd, and then shifts his comm so that the items are more pleasingly arranged. He adjusts his padd too, and then steps away before he is tempted to pick up the postcard again, as if examining it one more time will avail him of answers.

It will not, so instead he turns his back to it and begins perusing his bookshelf, a task which is not suitable engrossing to help quiet his thoughts.

As such, he is not overly surprised that he finds that someone in is the doorway to his office without him noticing that they have entered. It is not a lapse in attention that he finds acceptable, and his frustration with himself palpable, as much as he attempts to dismiss it.

When he turns to find that it is Nyota standing in his doorway, his first instinct is to note that taking into account the two times she called him, this is now the third instance in which she has quite unexpectedly made her presence known in the very same instance he has been thinking of her, which in turn forces him to acknowledge that as he has thought of little else since he left Earth - and well before his departure if he is to be honest with himself - she would be hard pressed to contact him at a time that circumstance would not hold true.

His second instinct is to move towards her, the full force of how much he missed her nearly spurring him into action before he can regain the composure to arrest such a movement.

It is excellent that she is there and yet he cannot help but note that it is inconvenient as well, as he has not been afforded the opportunity to decide what to do about the postcard and is furthermore unsure if this will then qualify as the instance of them speaking upon his return, and if it is, he is not certain that he is sufficiently focused so as to fully utilize the occasion to leverage a second occurrence. He is also hesitant as to how to even begin speaking to her now that she is there, and while the wait for this moment seems disproportionate to the amount of time that actually passed, it was not apparently sufficient to help him in deciding what to say.

As such, his first statement to her upon his return is not precisely factual as he does not have the time to give it the consideration it requires. “I presumed you were in class.”

It would be more accurate to say that he presumed she was otherwise occupied, but now that he is spoken he is unsure if he should take the opportunity to correct himself.

“I was. And then I got lunch.”

“I see.” That is logical. To be expected, really. It should not have escaped him that most students would be doing so at this time of day.

“I was-“ She runs her hand over her hair, through her ponytail, pulls it forward over her shoulder and then pushes it back again. It is curiously restless behavior, the likes of which he has seen her display only infrequently. He does not know now, as ever, how to interpret it, a failing on his part that he rues now more than ever before as insight into her mental state would be much appreciated. If she were Vulcan, he could extend his hand to her to ascertain such. Of course if she were Vulcan, she would have been very unlikely to suggest the arrangement that has caused them to be there today, in his office, and he finds himself quite thankful that this circumstance has arisen no matter how uncertain he is as to how to proceed. “I was looking for Machesky.”

“I believe you will find he is not here today.” Nor is he in Spock’s office, though he does not point that fact out to her. She is undoubtedly aware of that herself, and he does not wish to convey any dissatisfaction with her presence there. 

He just wishes that he was certain in his ability to clearly communicate the opposite sentiment.

“He’s not.”

“His office was shut,” Spock says, as it was one of the doors he had found his attention drawn to. She must know that as well, so informing her of such is likely illogical, though he finds it exceptionally difficult to care.

“It still is.”

“Are you intending to teach his class again?” Spock asks and as he watches, she nods and draws her bag further up her shoulder, then smooths her palms over her sweater and skirt before grasping her wrist. Her fingers are pleasingly slender and long and it is somewhat trying to redirect his attention from them in order to continue speaking to her. 

He must, however, since he is uncertain as to when he will have another opportunity to do so, and even if another occasion does come about, they may not be in such relative privacy where he has so much of her attention.

“Have you solved the issue with the environmental controls?”

“With the-“ she begins before cutting herself off. He has to divert his attention from the nearly imperceptible lift of the corner of his mouth to focus on Commander Ho, who has somehow chosen that exact moment to enter his office. “Sorry. Sorry, sirs, I can come back later.”

“Machesky’s out this week,” the Commander states with her typical brisk efficiency which Spock normally admires. Now, however, he simply hopes that it predicates her swift departure.

“I saw that his office was locked,” Nyota says and Ho nods and glances towards the direction of Machesky’s office, though by doing so ends up looking straight at the wall of Spock’s own. It is a particularly human habit, one which has no grounding in logic.

Neither does his ire that Ho is insistent on discussing Machesky, as it is irrational that Spock wishes to have a more personal conversation with Nyota right then. They are at work. It is wholly inappropriate, a fact which Nyota does not appear to be struggling with as much as he is.

“You can cover his class again?” Ho asks and Nyota promptly nods.

“Of course.”

“How do the students feel about that?” Ho asks and apparently, by some means that are unclear to Spock, derives an answer to her own question from Nyota’s ensuing silence. He finds himself rather envious of that ability, as drawing information from Nyota is rather difficult at times. “Right. Well. I’ll call him, again. Or I’ll see if I can move my meeting with Stoyer and I’ll come and teach it.”

“I am available,” Spock offers, which is logical. It would be unadvisable to impinge upon Ho’s time, or Arlene’s already overburdened scheduled, especially as Puri has so recently returned and he is certain that they would not wish their personal time encroached upon. If Spock is in a position to aid Puri, he would be remiss in doing otherwise.

That there is a secondary happenstance of increased time spent with Nyota as a result of such an offer is amenable. Preferable, even. Exceptionally satisfactory.

“That would be…” Ho starts, then glances at Nyota again. “Helpful. Are you really free for that period this week?”

It is a human trait to seek such reassurance, one which Spock does not appreciate as it delays Ho’s departure.

“I would not have otherwise offered.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

So too is expressing unneeded gratitude. 

“Of course.”

“Well,” Ho says, then gives Spock a small smile for no apparent reason. “Welcome back.”

He has only just repressed the relief that swells as a result of her departure when her return prompts a swift sense of impatience and annoyance.

“How many classes are you picking up now that you’re back?” Ho asks from the doorway.

“Only three,” Spock answers.

“Right, because of the Enterprise and the-“ Ho cuts herself and looks towards Nyota and Spock feels himself tense, unbidden, at the near mention of the Kobayashi Maru. Avoiding such a subject with Nyota may very well prove difficult, which is a fact that seems much more consequential now that he has returned to Earth. “Can you teach Advanced Morphology for the rest of the semester then?”

The irritation that Ho’s presence has caused is quickly rendered insignificant.

“Yes,” he states unequivocally, even though agreeing to such only increases the predicament of avoiding a discussion about the simulation. He can tell Nyota, again, that he cannot discuss it if the topic arises except that by doing so he might inadvertently convey that the test is of some seriousness and it is important that cadets have little to no idea of the simulation’s import. His other option, though it is one he is not inclined towards, is to do what most officers do regarding the position they are placed in when they have a friendship or other close connection with a cadet - which was the situation Arlene was in - and simply avoid the cadet in question. It would be exceptionally unfortunate, though the test is in the near enough future that it might be of little consequence.

“This isn’t going to be a problem, is it?” Ho asks.

“No,” Spock says and resolves that he will simply decide on a suitable course of action regarding the simulation. Later, when he has time to think and meditate, he is certain that the best approach will become apparent to him and until then, he will simply be optimistic that the topic is not raised.

He just hopes that similar clarity as to how to interact with Nyota in affairs other than just the Kobayashi Maru is also forthcoming.

“Do I need to talk to Stoyer about this?” 

That, at least, is simple enough to answer, though if he were not half-Vulcan he might be inclined to tell Ho that she should do so, simply so that he could hear the incident related later via Puri. “You do not.”

“If it was anyone else I’d say no,” Ho says and looks between them in a manner that Spock presumes is intended to convey the seriousness of the matter, though why she does not simply state such is lost on him.

“Understood.”

“Cadet?” Ho asks.

“It’s not going to be a problem. At all,” Nyota answers and the conviction in her voice is reassuring. He might have thought to discuss working together in a more permanent capacity with her prior to agreeing to it. It is a considerable oversight, but one which is assuaged by her apparent certainty.

That he is unsure if her agreement that it will not be an issue to continue in a professional capacity is due to the fact that professionalism is the only vein in which they will interact, is problematic. However, it is perhaps not a matter than he can reasonably concern himself with in any way until after she has taken the test.

Then, at least, he will have more freedom to talk with her. Until that happens, he will work with her, which is more than he had thought to hope for.

“Good.” Ho glances at Nyota again, then nods. “Well. That’s good. I’ll leave you two to it, then.”

It is silent in the wake of Ho’s departure. He attempts to formulate a conversation topic, perhaps surrounding the upcoming obligations he now has for Advanced Morphology - a commitment which will impinge upon his time in a serious way which is something he will have to consider further as his schedule will be rather overburdened in the coming days and weeks. He could also ask as to how Nyota’s semester is and if there is any change in the satisfaction she feels for her classes, or perhaps make the offer of showing her the list of colloquialisms that he retrieved.

That those are all professional subjects is problematic, as despite the fact that they are in his office he wishes to in someway convey that he desires to continue their practice of discussing personal matters. He could ask about her friends, perhaps, though he does not know of any other than her roommate so that topic would be quickly exhausted. She has only rarely mentioned her family so he is uncertain if that is an appropriate subject to raise. It would also be feasible to tell her about his trip, as she has repeatedly expressed interest in the Enterprise, except that he remains unclear as to what constitutes a suitable time for such a discussion and does not wish to place her in a position for a second time where she must inform him that now is not appropriate.

Nyota looks as if she is very nearly smiling and it is that face that redirects his attention to the postcard on his desk. He is doubtful that this is the correct time to give it to her, though when a more proper occasion might be is not something he has the ability to determine. He may also not get another chance in the near future and while he has yet to decide with any certainty if she truly wishes to acquire a postcard, perhaps it is only logical to let her make that determination.

When he holds it out to her, she takes it from his hand, and when her smile grows he feels something in his chest ease.

“What’s this?” she asks, though he believes that should be apparent. “Oh my God, it’s like an antique.”

“It is not,” he corrects.

“It looks like one. You found an actual postcard?”

He is unclear as to what an notional postcard might be, but does not think it particularly appropriate to ask, not when she is displaying signs of such genuine delight.

“Yes,” he says as he watches the way her fingers run over the edge of the card. “Puri purchased one for Arlene as well.”

“You two,” she says, which is a phrase that Spock has heard before, often said with less endearment and warmth than Nyota used and much more consternation from Arlene. “But, no, you have to send it. You can’t just give it to me.”

He should have anticipated that even despite her apparent excitement, that he would fail in some capacity to fully carry out this task, though he is wholly unclear as to her direction.

“Why?”

“Because,” she says and despite the fact that he is disappointed that he did not sufficiently fulfill all the customs surrounding the postcard, her response threatens to cause him to smile.

“I believe we have sufficiently established that is not an adequate answer.”

“No,” she says and regardless of her negative statement she continues to smile. “You have to actually send it and you have to write something on it.”

It would have been logical for her to explain that in the first place, a fact which he chooses to withhold as he does not anticipate it would be overly appreciated and he does not wish to interfere with her current state of happiness.

“What, specifically?” he asks.

“Just something. It’s just the way it is.”

“This is not rational,” he informs her.

“No, I know it’s totally not,” she says and runs her hand over her hair in another display of restlessness, one which he still cannot understand any more than why she returned the postcard to him, or what she expects him to write on it, or why that is necessary.

Her eyes brighten when she smiles. It is not something he had forgotten while he was gone, but it is inordinately pleasing to observe it once again in person.

“Do you want to maybe-“

“Commander?” Ho asks and Spock is left to hypothesize what the end of Nyota’s statement might have been, though he does not have sufficient facts to make a probable guess. “Sorry, I just realized I need you to fill out a couple forms.”

His desire to continue speaking to Nyota, especially in a way that might preserve her current mood, is irrelevant when held against his duties as a professor, so he does not allow himself to hesitate as he follows Ho into the corridor.

He does, however, permit himself to turn towards Nyota once more.

“I will see you soon,” he states and is pleased when she quickly nods.

“Yeah. See you soon.”

He runs his finger along the edge of the postcard with his free hand as he fills out the required forms in Ho’s office, giving them the minimal attention necessary as he contemplates what ‘soon’ might mean. That evening, perhaps, or more certainly the following day. While he did not have a sufficient reason to contact her while he was gone, he now has multiple grounds to, as they will be working together as often if not more so than they did over the summer.

“Thank you, Commander,” Ho says as he passes the padd back to her. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find Machesky and either fire him or send him to the Outer Rim.”

“I believe the Hood is hiring a new janitorial detail.”

“I’m glad to have you back,” Ho says with a smile. Her eyes drop to the postcard in his hand, which he quickly tucks behind his back once more. “Since while you’re working in my department, I’m your supervisor, it would be inappropriate of me to take this opportunity to tell you that you that I’m very happy for both of you.”

He is unable to formulate a response in the time that it takes for Ho to step out of her office, leaving him silent in the wake of not only her comment, but all that has occurred since Nyota entered his office.

He returns to his office, closes the door, and sits at his desk, where he once more arranges his padd and the postcard, glancing at the spot where Nyota stood as he does so, thinking that it is not an insubstantial reorientation of circumstances that has just occurred. 

It is logical, he is certain, that he teach Advanced Morphology if there is a need for a professor, and that Nyota is the teaching assistant is simply fortuitous. Also, perhaps, slightly complex as now that he is alone and is able to more thoroughly settle his thoughts, he is forced to acknowledge that while she appeared pleased to see him again, he is not necessarily any closer to understanding what type of relationship she wants with him than he was before he returned. And now, complicating matters more, they are once again engaged in a professional relationship which means that while he will be able to see her more often than otherwise, the disparity in their ranks is once more of significant consequence. So too does the upcoming Kobayashi Maru introduce increased complexity into their interactions, though at least that will be resolved in short time.

He is certain that he is entirely capable of discerning an appropriate course of action in regards to his relationship with her, though how to do so is not readily apparent.

It is no matter. In due time, he will determine what he should do. It would simply be fortuitous if he could ascertain what actions would be best in the immediate future.

He picks up his comm, intending to perhaps call her, and then sets it down again as he is unsure of what he might say if she answers. Instead, he turns the postcard over to look at the blank back and considers options of what to write on it, though no acceptable ideas are particularly forthcoming and he replaces it where it was. He could plan to eat in the mess hall at dinner and aim to speak to her then, though he does not wish to place himself in a position of having to discuss the simulation, nor does he particularly desire to talk to her while her friends are present.

He will wait until he sees her in his office, except that he very well may not have much occasion to do so in the near future as he has a significant amount of work to do not only to prepare the Kobayashi Maru but also to complete the necessary reports from the Enterprise’s space trials.

He will message her, he decides, though when he calls up his inbox on his padd to compose a message, he is unable to decide what to write.

He will, perhaps, wait for her to contact him. It might very well be the most suitable course of action, though perhaps only if she is inclined to do so.

She was smiling quite broadly.

However, that does not indicate she wishes to pursue a relationship. She might simply be pleased to be working together again. She might be seeing someone else. She might have no interest in interacting with him in a personal manner. He might very well only have professional contact with her from this junction onward.

He picks up the postcard again, resolves to write something, and once again summarily fails to do so.

He would contact Puri except that the Doctor is very likely currently unavailable.

He should have taken Nyota’s advice to develop a closer relationship with the Captain.

He could contact his father. There is a message from him in Spock’s inbox that he has delayed in reading, and replying to it would afford him the opportunity to seek advice.

He does not do so. His father will have no insight that Spock cannot deduce himself through logic, and the logical course of action would be to simply wait and let Nyota take action in regards to their relationship if she wishes to, which is the same circumstance he has faced for some time now.

He supposes that it is somewhat fortunate that he is accustomed to the particular frustration that situation instills in him.

If, at the end of the semester she remains single and they are not yet dating in a formal capacity, he will broach the subject then. Probably. Only if there is no chance that they will work together in the future, as he does not wish to cause her any discomfort of being pursued romantically by a senior officer.

Which, now that he considers it, is not a valid option as she has repeatedly stated that she wishes to serve on the Enterprise.

He will simply wait until they are closer in rank, several years from now and hope that her statements that she does not date are accurate and do not lead to her forming a connection with an individual other than himself in that time.

He lets out a long breath before he can stop himself, picks up the postcard once more, then puts it down again.

He has work to do in the immediate future. He will do so, will avoid the topic of the Kobayashi Maru with Nyota, and will meditate further on what actions might be available to him once she has completed the simulation. In the meantime, he will continue to contemplate potentially suitable messages to write on the back of the postcard, as well as the truly unique route that led him to such an illogical set of circumstances as these.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to albinofrog for the beta! I, of course, just had to go back and mess around after she read through it, so the remaining mistakes are mine.

“Nyota?” she hears and looks up from her cereal so quickly that she’s surprised she doesn’t hurt her neck.

“Hi,” she says, letting her spoon fall back into her bowl and wondering how long Spock’s been there and if she missed him walking into the mess hall, even though it’s so early in the morning that nobody else is there yet.  She must have, since he has a bowl of what looks like oatmeal in his hand.  She’s staring at that, his long fingers wrapped around the ceramic and the spoon he has tucked under his thumb before she realizes that he’s still just standing there, so she grabs for her padds and pulls them out of the way so that he has room to sit down.  If that’s what he was going to do, even, because who knows where he normally sits in the mess hall during the semester and she has no idea why he’s not eating in his apartment and maybe he was just stopping by to say good morning and was going to continue on, but now she has half of the table cleared off.  She tries to calm her thoughts, but he’s he’s here, he’s back, he’s on Earth and in the mess hall with her first thing in the morning and that’s making everything a little fuzzy, her entire brain buzzing at the sight of him there.

He looks down at the chair across from her and she thinks for a second that she should put the padds back, that she misinterpreted his greeting and he was just saying hi, but then he’s looks at her again.

“May I join you?” he asks and she nods, dropping her padds on the chair next to her.

“How was-“ she starts, then can’t decide what should come next.  Being back, being gone, his evening last night, his meeting with Ho, his trip back to Earth, his time on the Enterprise.  She tries to choose but can’t because there’s just so much she wants to know, too many things she wants to talk to him about and she didn’t see him yesterday after work and he didn’t get in touch with her last night, and she doesn’t know when she’s going to see him again after this, but no words are coming to her so she just repeats, “Hi.”

“Hello,” he says, then adds, “Good morning.”

She thinks he’s maybe smiling but she’s not entirely sure and doesn’t want to stare at him to find out because they’re in the mess hall, not off campus and not in his apartment and not even in his office, except that it’s hard to look anywhere else.

“You’re here early,” she points out which is obvious and just makes him glance around at the empty tables surrounding him.

“You are as well,” he says and she also looks around the room, then back at him sitting right there across from her, just the table between them.  She tries to keep herself from just greeting him again, attempting to find something else to say.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she admits as she picks up her spoon again, then puts it back down and wraps her hand around her mug of tea.  It’s still warm to the touch even though she hasn’t been drinking it, but instead has just been bent over her cereal as she tried not to yawn after a long, sleepless night of staring blankly at the ceiling, too wired to rest and too tired to do anything but lie there.

She feels awake now, his presence unexpected enough that she’s entirely focused on him, the way his bowl is neatly centered on the table in front of him, the careful, precise bites of his breakfast that he takes.  She should keep eating too except that every time she starts to, she finds herself just looking at him again.

She can’t pick out what she wants to ask him or say to him now that he’s there and what had been a cloud of early morning exhaustion blurring her thoughts is now something that feels tremulous, makes it hard to concentrate.  It’s the same way she felt yesterday after leaving his office, and all of last night as she wondered if she was going to hear from him in regards to him very suddenly being her boss, or about class this week, or about anything, really.  She spent the night thinking that she should maybe call him, but she hadn’t been able to land on a question to ask or what in particular she would want to talk about, so instead she had just sat there with her comm next to her, occasionally flicking it open and then closed again.

It’s the same now, questions crowding into her brain and then dissipating all at once, leaving her keyed up to ask him a half dozen things and oddly blank at the same time, so that he’s taken another bite of his breakfast, and then another one, glancing up at her in between them, before she finally says, “I have to take that test on Tuesday during your office hours.”

“Pardon?” he asks and she doesn’t blame him for his confusion with the way she just blurted that out.

“Your office hours.  On Tuesdays.  Since if you’re teaching Intermediate AI and Interspecies Ethics and Theory of Software Design then you’ll be in the Xenolinguistics building then? Tuesday afternoons?” she asks before realizing that it’s actually very strange that she looked up his new teaching schedule last night.  But she had wanted to know and he hadn’t called her and with Machesky gone her week will be different and she just wanted a handle on her schedule and her comm had been stonily silent.  She could have called him, but he could have also called her and he didn’t, so she didn’t, and instead she looked up his schedule and now she wishes that she hadn’t told him that, not with how incredibly embarrassing that suddenly seems.  

“I will be in the department more often than that,” he says, and she thinks he’s speaking more quickly than usual or maybe the difference is just that he’s right there, his voice not filtered through half of the solar system.

“But aren’t you teaching in Computer Sciences mostly?” she asks, feeling slightly flushed.  That’s what she just said, just told him and he knows that too so she really shouldn’t be repeating herself like this but can’t seem to stop.  As much as she wills it to, that warmth in her cheeks also won’t fade, and it should.  It’s just Spock.  She spent all summer sharing meals with him, this is no different.

Except that she didn’t know that he’d be eating breakfast in the mess hall, and she hasn’t spent any time with him since before the semester started, and she hasn’t talked to him, not really, not when two quick comm calls were all she heard from him after an entire summer together.

“I do not have an office in that building.”

“But doesn’t it make sense to switch?”

“I prefer my current office.”

“Ok.”  She takes a bite of cereal.  It’s soggy and she wishes she’d gotten oatmeal like he did, since his looks pretty good, warm and steaming and not as mushy as her breakfast is.  She glances at his bowl again, then up at him, and tries to say to herself what she’s about to tell him so that it won’t come out strangled and garbled and awkward, the way that it seems to want to.  “Either way, I still have that test.”

“I am occupied that afternoon as well.”

“Good,” she says before realizing that it’s a slightly off response to what he just said.  It’s not good that he’s occupied, it’s ok or it’s fine or it’s all right and she could have said any of those but instead she said ‘good’.  

She’s tired.  And slightly thrown from having him show up, and mixed in with that is the excitement that she doesn’t have to deal with Machesky ever again, and instead it’s Spock who’s going to be her boss.

And he’s back, right there across from her eating his breakfast, nearly like he never left.

Except that he did and when she sees him next it’ll be in his office and this is her only chance for however long to actually talk to him, but her mind is completely empty. He could come up with some to say, but he doesn’t, which is slightly off because the quiet between them as they eat isn’t normal, not when they spent all summer talking about work over the meals they shared.

“Can I ask you about my paper?” she says to break the silence.  “I don’t know where to submit it and Machesky wasn’t any help.  And I know I need to decide soon, but I haven’t been able to figure out which journal is most likely to accept it. I mean, of course I know that if it gets rejected I can always send it somewhere else but…”

She’s talking too much.  She should let him actually say something and shouldn’t ramble like that. She has no idea why he’s there so early but maybe he’s busy and has work to get to and she’s likely keeping him from starting his day, so she shouldn’t be jabbering at him, and she yelled at him so many times about being rude that now he’s just going to politely sit there and not move even though he’s nearly done with his breakfast, and she really doesn’t need to keep him if he has to get going.

The memories of getting exasperated with him over the summer threaten to make her smile and she wants to say something about it, remind him that he’s one to get up and walk away if he feels like it, but she’s not sure that she should. It’s not summer, and she’s not supposed to be speaking to officers like that, and they’re not in private but instead in the middle of the mess hall and that fact is just reminding her that he’s a commander and she’s a cadet and it’s the semester now, not the long weeks that they spent together before he left. So even though she thinks about reaching out to maybe poke at his arm, or nudge him, or tell him that he can inform her that she’s being illogical, instead she picks up her spoon again and takes another bite of her soggy cereal.

“Perhaps the Sociolinguistics Quarterly Review or the Journal of Comparative Xenolinguistics,” he says as he finishes the last of his oatmeal.

“I thought of those,” she says and nods even though she really wants him to tell her which would be better. He won’t, probably, since he likely wants her to make the choice, as it’s her paper. Which she can do. Should do, really, since she’s perfectly able to figure this out on her own.

Except that she didn’t do any part of her paper without him, not when he helped her with the analysis and read through her drafts and gave her his final comments, and then stayed on the comm with her explaining them, and so it’s odd and too unusual to even think about having to do this final part by herself. 

Not that he’s moved even though he’s done with his food and answered her question, but instead is still sitting there, and he’s looking at her with that focus of his, that way she had his attention all summer, heavy and weighty and directed right at her.

She blinks, thinking she should look away, but doesn’t. 

“The Xenolinguistics Academic Review would also be an appropriate choice, but is fairly discriminating and I believe their submission guidelines require an atypical format that might take you some effort to prepare,” he says and she feels herself start to smile.  “I presume you are rather busy with your class work and it would be an extra burden on your time.”

“Well, I’m pretty good at formatting these days after redoing all your materials for Machesky,” she tells him.  “Sorry about that.”

“There is no need to apologize.”  He picks up his spoon and she thinks that he’s going to go, but instead he just straightens it so that it’s sitting more neatly next to his empty bowl.  “While you are choosing where to submit your paper, if you are willing and have an opportunity to do so, my father requested a copy.”

She feels her hand come up to her forehead and tries to prevent the flush she can feel spreading across her cheeks.  “No.”

“I will inform him that one is not available.”

“No, I meant no as in-”

“A negative response?” he asks and maybe he is smiling, just a little, if she looks closely.

“Stop,” she says lightly, grinning herself even though she tries not to, pressing her fingers to her mouth.  “He doesn’t really want to read it.”

“I presume that reading it is the intended motivation behind requesting it.”

“No,” she says again and she’s repeating herself and tells herself to say something else, but her mind is hazy and blank again.

“You do realize that when it is published he will have access to it,” Spock says and she thinks that he is smiling, or maybe he’s pointing out the particular irrationality of her line of reasoning since his expression doesn’t shift as much as it used to back during the summer, which just makes her want to stare at him that much more, trying to pick apart his mannerisms after so many weeks of not seeing him.

“No, I know I know,” she says.  He said ‘when’ and not ‘if’ and she can’t help smiling at him again.

“It is an exemplary piece of work,” he tells her and he’s still looking right at her, his focus on her like it used to be when they ate together, all those hours they spent working and talking.

She touches her mouth again, presses the back of her knuckles to her lips.  “Thanks, no, I meant that-“

“Sir?” she hears and glances up at a young woman who looks only slightly older than herself standing next to them and when she got there, Nyota has no idea.

“Lieutenant,” Spock says and his voice is crisp and brusque and professional and he must have been leaning forward slightly in his chair, not that she noticed when he had done so, since now he’s sitting upright again.

The other woman’s voice isn’t nearly as brisk, though she gives him a huge smile as she tucks a strand of blond hair behind her ear, and that’s strange, to see someone smiling at him that isn’t one of the crew, or Stoyer, but instead this woman who he apparently knows.  “Welcome back, Commander.”

“You have completed the compilation of the resonance cybernetic network so soon?”

“I have,” she answers, then sticks the padd she’s carrying under her arm and sticks her hand out to Nyota.  “I’m Lieutenant Rand.  You must be Uhura.”

She has no idea how the other woman knows who she finds herself hesitating for a moment, so that she ends up taking a beat too long to reach out and shake the Lieutenant’s hand. 

“Nice to meet you,” she tells the other woman automatically and receives another big smile.

“You too,” Rand says before turning back to Spock.  “Are you still available to go over it now?  If this isn’t a good time, I can catch up with you later today.”

That’s why he’s there, of course, why he got up and went to the mess hall so early in the morning.  He has a meeting and she was probably preventing him from preparing for it and he’s busy, much busier than she is since he’s now teaching yet another class and he came back so suddenly in the middle of the semester to a pile of work and he has colleagues he needs to catch up with.

Which is fine. Strange that he never mentioned that he works so closely with anyone else, but it’s not like they ever spent much time talking about his other positions at the Academy, or who else he knows, or how he spends his days when he’s not with her.

And it’s none of her business, really. 

Spock doesn’t answer the Lieutenant, just nods and he should really be more communicative.  Nyota could tell him that, remind him to actually speak when spoken to, to look less austere and stern about everything but it’s not the summer anymore, it’s the middle of the semester and he’s trying to have a meeting and she’s in his way.

“Sorry,” she says to Rand, grabbing her bag off the chair and Rand sits in it, thanking her as Nyota gathers her padds as quickly as she can.

“You can send him one,” she tells Spock as she stands up.  She’s not hungry anymore and she’s not going to go sit at another table while they work so she just picks up her dishes and glances towards the dirty dish receptacle.  “Or I mean I can send you a copy to send to him.”

Spock doesn’t say anything, just looks up at her as Rand puts her own work on the table, replacing the spot where Nyota’s padd was with her own.

“I can take that for you,” she tells Spock and nods to the empty bowl in front of him when he still hasn’t spoken and is still just looking up at her.

“I really don’t mean to interrupt,” Rand says and Nyota quickly shakes her head.

“I have work to get to,” she assures the other woman, taking the bowl from Spock when he hands it to her and stacking her own on top of it.  “I’ll, uh-“ She glances between them sitting there with their work spread between them, then takes a step back.  “I’ll see you in the office, later.”

“Have a pleasant morning,” Spock finally says and she gives him a short, abrupt nod and forces a smile towards the Lieutenant as she walks away.

She takes a quick sip of her half-finished tea as she carries her dishes to the receptacle, but it cooled off and she doesn’t bother to finish the rest.

…

Spock isn’t in the office that day or the next, and when she sees him next it’s in class and he’s so surrounded by students asking about any changes he’s going to make to the syllabus that she barely gets to exchange a half dozen words with him.

Instead she gets a message that night asking her to finish grading the papers he hasn’t gotten to, since he has some project that he doesn’t name that he’s trying to finish.  She imagines that it’s for the Enterprise, or something else that he doesn’t feel the need to go into detail about, which is fine.  It’s not like she needs guidance from him and it’s not like she really has anything to ask regarding how he wants grading done since his rubric is much, much clearer than any of Machesky’s ever were, and it’s completely fine that it will already be the end of the week when she sees him again, or even speaks to him since he hasn’t called and she hasn’t found a reason to comm him, either.  She has work, anyway, padds and padds full of homework to worry about and it’s probably better that working for him is simpler and more efficient than it was with Machesky.  Easier, really, that she knows him well enough that they don’t have to spend much time talking.

It’s just slightly different than how it was at the end of the summer when they talked so much. Of course, it isn’t summer, it’s the semester. She’s sure that he’s busy and the least she can do is take the quizzes off of his plate.

“I didn’t think you were around today,” she admits when she glances up from the tea bag she’s opening to see him walk past the break room on Friday afternoon, then turn around and come to stand in the doorway.

“I was not, earlier.”

“I know.”  She pours hot water into her mug, watching it dampen the tea bag and slowly fill the cup. 

“Thank you for completing the grading.”

“Oh, you saw that?  I left them on your desk.”

“I did.”

“Good, good,” she says, nodding at her cup.  She wasn’t certain that leaving them there for him was the best choice, not when he seems to be spending half of his time elsewhere on campus. 

Teaching, she’s sure. And probably whatever project it is that he’s working on with Lieutenant Rand.

He’s still standing there, silent and unmoving and when she glances at him, he’s watching her slowly stir her tea.

“Want a cup?” she offers and she thinks he’s going to shake his head, but instead he takes a step into the room.

“Please.”

He takes another step as she pulls a second mug out of the cupboard.  She’s about to ask him what kind he wants but then he’s moving even closer and reaching into one of the top shelves, his jacket pulling along his back and lifting up as he does so.  She tries to keep her eyes on the mug in her hand instead of on the sliver of skin above where the waistband of his pants sit against his flat, pale stomach.

“I-“ she starts, staring down into the mug and blinking.  “I left a copy of my paper, too, for your father.”

“I saw.”

“Yeah, I didn’t know if I’d run into you or not.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course.”  She puts his mug on the counter and opens the tea bag that he set on the counter for her.  “You- I thought you said you’d be around the department more often.”

“I have a number of projects to complete before I am able to do so.”

“Right.”  She spins his mug around once, for no reason, and makes herself stop before she does it again.

“It is not my preference.”

“Sure.” She nods and turns his mug so that the handle is parallel to the edge of the counter. “Are you having a good week back?”

“Passable.”

“Not that great then?” she asks, pouring hot water into his mug.  She tosses out the wrapper of the tea bags as he picks his mug up and then there’s nothing more to do after that.  She wraps her hand around her own mug, taking a tiny sip from it and glancing up at him, wondering if he’s going to leave, if there’s somewhere else he needs to be.

“Do you have many examinations in the near future?” he asks instead of answering and she has to look away from how big his hand seems on his mug, the way his fingers are curled around it.

“I have a Cardassian midterm on Thursday and a paper due Friday.”  She taps her nails against her cup, once, and then twice.  “And I have that test on Tuesday.”

“Of course.”

“It, uh-  You can’t tell me how long it’s going to take, can you?” she asks since she has homework and has been trying to fit going to the gym into her week, and it would be good to know if she’s going to be stuck in some simulation room for the entirety of the afternoon and evening.

“No.”

“Ok.”

She shouldn’t have asked.  He’s looking down into his tea, not at her, and she shouldn’t have brought it up.  It’s fine, really, that she doesn’t have any idea of what it’s going to be like since Kirk doesn’t know much about it either but she likes to at least have an idea of what she’s getting herself into and there’s something about not being able to talk about it with Spock that somehow makes that worse.

She takes a quick sip of tea and makes herself look at him as she says, “I’m sorry for asking.”

“It is no matter.”

“Still,” she says.  She doesn’t know if she would have brought it up with another professor, someone she hadn’t spent all summer with.  She wouldn’t have, probably.  Definitely.  It’s not like she’s comming Ho or Wyke or Irani or even any of her other instructors that she sees weekly for classes.  Of course, she’s not exactly comming Spock, either, and he’s not getting in touch with her, not while he was gone and not now that he’s back.

“You are still enjoying your Cardassian class?” he asks and she presses her lips together as she nods.

“I am,” she says, sipping at her tea again.   

“Excellent.”

“Yeah.”  She takes another sip of her tea and looks up at him.  “You’ve seemed pretty busy.  Since you’ve been back, I mean.”

He nods, glancing down at his tea again.  “It is rather complicated to have returned in the middle of the semester.”

“Of course.”  She runs her thumb up and down the handle of her mug, flicking her nail against it.  “Anything interesting that you’re working on now that you’re back?”

He pauses for long enough that she wishes she hadn’t asked that either, not if he’s not going to answer.

“Or anything for the Enterprise?” she prompts even though she tells herself to let it drop.

“The auxiliary flux compensator needs significant recalibration,” he answers, quicker than she thought he would.

“Sure,” she says, nodding again like she has any idea what that is.  She wraps both hands around her mug and stares down into it, watching the steam slowly twist and curl.  “I heard there’s going to be a big party now that the ship’s back.”

She looks up at him in time to see the briefest crease appear between his brows, which makes her want to smile.

“So it’s true, then,” she says, lifting her mug to take another drink from it.

“No plans have been finalized as of yet.”

“I bet you can’t wait.”

“Rather, I find that-“

“Uhura?” she hears and she tries very, very hard to not groan or sigh or do anything else that she wants to, and only lets herself tighten her fingers around her mug in annoyance when she looks past Spock to see Barrett.

“Yes?” she asks in what is hopefully an even tone.

“I was wondering about the Romulan tutorial,” Barrett says, walking closer to her so that Spock has to move out of his way, and she didn’t realize that Spock was even standing so close to her, but apparently he was because when Barrett steps into that same space, she can’t help but move backwards, away from him.  “Remember when we talked about it the other day? Do you have time this week to go over it?”

“It’s Friday,” she reminds him.  “So no, not really.”

“Tomorrow? You said that we could meet up about it,” Barrett says, and even though Spock moved to the side, she can tell that he doesn’t like having Barrett so close, not with the way he starts edging towards the door. 

“I’m busy tomorrow, all day.”  She is, probably.  She has enough work that she doesn’t really have free time and she is especially unwilling to carve any out for Barrett of all people.

“Sunday?” he asks and Spock takes another step towards the door.  She wants to stop him but frankly he has the right idea getting out of there.

“I can’t do Sunday either, I have homework,” she says, wishing that she were following Spock out into the hall.

“But over lunch or something?” Barrett asks and she pulls her attention away from Spock’s retreating back.

“Barrett, no,” she says, firmly. “You can message me and we can set up a time that is during a work day and not over a meal.”

“I’ll call you,” Barrett says.

“Message,” she corrects and waits until he leaves to let out the breath she was holding.

She looks down into her mug of tea, decides that she doesn’t want it after all, and dumps it out into the sink.

“Hey, Spock,” she says when she gets to his office.  “Sorry, that was, he-”

“It is no matter,” he tells her from where he’s seated at his desk. 

“He’s just-”

“I understand that you are busy but will you have time this weekend to change the slides back to how they were?” Spock asks, his attention still on his padd.  The postcard he got her is right there, leaning against a framed holo of a Vulcan landscape.  There’s still nothing written on it, which she’s not particularly proud of checking but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from picking it up to see, both yesterday and earlier that morning.  She wonders if he can tell that she probably didn’t set it down in the exact same spot as before.

“What?” she asks, blinking at him.  “Yes, I can, of course.”

She should have guessed that he wanted that done, probably could have started on it already, but she hasn’t exactly seen him long enough to have time to discuss details like that.  He could have called her, though, or at least have written her a message, or have taken a break from the cadets trailing after him out of class to exchange a couple words about it.

“Is there anything else?” she asks since he still isn’t looking at her.

“That is all.”

If it were still summer, she would try to catch his eye or she might walk around his desk to stand closer to him to get his attention, or she would point out to him that he’s being needlessly difficult, but it’s not summer. It’s the middle of the semester and they’re in his office and she’s working for him.

“What, um,” she starts, realizing that she’s playing with the end of her ponytail before she noticed that she’s started doing so.  She makes herself stop and brushes it back over her shoulder.  “Are you still so busy over the weekend?”

He is, probably, and he’s focused on his padd and she shouldn’t even ask him that since she has no idea what she’s going to suggest if he says he isn’t.  That she still wants to hear about the ship, and maybe they should get a cup of tea and catch up.  That if he’s willing, he can help her finish picking a journal to submit her paper to, not that he didn’t already tell her what he thought. 

That they haven’t really talked since he got back and they didn’t speak much while he was gone and after spending a summer together, that feels odd and strange, too big of a disconnect after sharing so much.

“I expect so,” he says as he reorganizes the padds on his desk, which she doesn’t think needs to be done, not based on what he was reading, but she doesn’t say anything.  “Yourself?”

“Just homework.”

“Of course.  As you told Cadet Barrett.”

“Yeah,” she says since she did say that to him, but that was more of an excuse than anything and surely Spock knows that.

She waits for him to say something else but he doesn’t, just keeps picking up padds, looking at them and setting them down like he doesn’t know exactly what’s on each one.

“Hey,” she says, taking a step closer to his desk.  She leans her fingertips on the very edge, running them back and forth over the polished wood, then nods towards the postcard.  “You ever going to send me that?”

He looks at it for a long moment, then back at the padd he’s holding.

She bites at the inside of her cheek, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t answer and she watches his chest rise and fall as he takes a breath. “C’mon, Spock, it’s-“

His comm rings and he reaches for it, answering it with that same crispness that he used when he answered her calls.

It’s Rand again, Nyota’s pretty sure, just from her voice and Spock calling her Lieutenant with enough familiarity that Nyota can guess that they speak pretty often.  She wonders what they’re working together on but he hasn’t said enough about his work that she has any idea.  Then again, he hasn’t said much of anything these days.

She doesn’t have any reason to stay and there’s nothing for her to do there, not since she finished all of her work for him and not since she already dropped the paper off for his father, and especially not if Spock’s going to be on his comm all afternoon, not when she doesn’t know what to say when he hangs up, or if she should even be listening to his conversation in the first place.

Barrett walks by in the hall again and she glances at him, thinking that she’s not going to stick around the building and risk being accosted again, so she takes a step towards the door, and then another one, glancing back to see if she can get Spock’s attention so that she can wave goodbye and maybe tell him to have a nice rest of his day and the weekend as well, but he’s looking at his padd, not at her.

Which is fine.  He’s busy.  She is too, although the weekend suddenly seems like a lot of time for her to fill, no matter how much work she has.

…

“They’re right there,” she says on Tuesday morning, since he wasn’t in the office all day Monday and she never got a chance to give him the slides back.  She points to his desk where she’s sure that he can see the datachip she loaded them onto, then turns back to the response papers he assigned last week that she’s trying to finish grading before that test Kirk’s making her take in the afternoon. 

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says not looking up from her work.

She hears him pick up the chip and plug it into his padd, start to scroll through it, and then set them down again.

“This is not the entirety of them,” he says and she finally turns to look at him.

“I couldn’t finish them all, not with the papers too,” she tells him.  It had taken her ages to reformat the slides for Machesky, though he hadn’t exactly looked through them closely enough to notice that she hadn’t finished them all at once.  Spock would know that, though, just by glancing at them and she immediately feels her stomach sink, realizing that she should have given him a heads up about it, since she doesn’t want him to think that she spent all weekend ignoring the task because she didn’t.  She went to the café that they spent so many hours at over the summer, sat down with mug after mug of tea and tried to get as much done as she could, but it obviously wasn’t enough.

“I can do them for tomorrow,” she promises.

“That is not needed.”

“No, I can, it’s no problem,” she assures him.

She thinks he’s going to say something else, but he just picks up his padd and his stylus.

“Was your weekend pleasant?” he asks after a long moment and she has to look up from the paper she’s started reading again.

“I had a lot of work to get through,” she says quickly because her chest still feels hot and tight with the fact that he thought she’d get through all the slides and she hadn’t.  “I spent all weekend doing it.”

“I presumed that you would be occupied with your work.”

“Yeah.”  She taps her stylus against the edge of her desk before realizing that she’s doing so and how annoying that must be.  “I went to that café.”

“I would not have thought you would choose to go there,” he says, looking up from his padd.

“Just for a change of pace.”  She hadn’t been there all semester and it had been odd to go back.  Nice, too, after all this time, to have their tea again and to sit at that same table they had spent so much hours at together.

“Do you not typically work in the library?”

“Yes, most of the time.”

With the way he’s watching her, she thinks he’s going to say something about that, but he finally just focuses on his padd again.

They used to talk while they worked over the summer, but then again they were working on the same projects, bent over a list of Romulan adjectives together or picking apart the research she had done.  Now, he’s occupied with whatever it is that he’s been working on and she’s grading and trying to ignore the padd with the rest of his slides on it that she needs to get done. 

She should have just skipped the gym over the weekend, or not have gone running for so long, but she had already begged off drinks with Gaila and she hadn’t gotten as much studying done for Cardassian as she wanted to, and working out was the only thing that had kept her feeling at all sane.  Now, though, it might have been worth it to stay up another couple of hours each night and to have just not gone to the gym all together, no matter that she can already feel her eyes pricking and burning from what little sleep she did get, even though she feels simultaneously restless and like she wants to get out of there and let herself pound out mile after mile on the treadmill.

She glances over at him but he’s still focused on his padd, giving her no clue as to whether or not he thinks that she should have just worked harder over the weekend, if his opinion on the matter is that there’s really no excuse that his slides aren’t done.

And maybe this is what Ho meant, that for a different professor Nyota would have stayed up until dawn finishing the project but she feels a certain level of familiarity with Spock that made her choose otherwise.

A certain level of familiarity and a propensity towards thinking about his hot skin under her hands, the way he kisses and how it feels to have his body against hers, his fingers tangled in her hair.

She blinks, opens another quiz and doesn’t let herself look at him again.

She puts the graded papers on the edge of his desk at the end of the morning, then shoves the padd with the rest of his slides on it into her bag.

“I have that test,” she says by way of explanation since she doesn’t want him to think that she’s just leaving whenever she feels like it.

“I am aware.”

“Right.”  Of course he knows that.  He remembers everything and is not likely to forget that she’s busy that afternoon.

He’s busy too with whatever it is that he has to do, not that he’s explained or mentioned it to her, and not that she can recognize the lines of code on his padd when she glances at it.

She needs to not be looking at his work like that.  She needs to leave, get something to eat, and get as many of his slides done as she can before the sim starts, and if she’s lucky she’ll be able to get enough of them done that she doesn’t have to choose between sleeping and studying for Cardassian all evening and night.

She can probably find a corner of the mess hall with nobody in it and put enough materials on the table and the other chairs that no one will bother her.  Or she can get a protein bar and an apple and come back to the office and keep working, or maybe she can just have a cup of tea and pretend that will fill her up and then she can keep sitting here with him in the room with her.

“Do you want to get lunch?” she finds herself asking before she can stop herself or even begin to think through the offer.

He immediately, quickly lifts his gaze from his work to look at her.

“You wish to have lunch together?” he asks, parroting it back at her in a way that seems altogether unnatural for him.

“Yes,” she says and wishes she sounded more certain than she feels.

“Today?”

“We don’t have to, only if you want,” she says, trying for a shrug and hoping that it seems far more casual than it feels.  She shouldn’t have asked. He’s in the middle of his work and she has to go, anyway, and doesn’t really have time to have a long lunch with him.

He’s still just looking at her and she wishes that he would just answer.

There’s a slight hesitation, a pause before he speaks that makes something in her stomach drop.  “I cannot.  I have a prior commitment this afternoon.”

“I just mean now, not this afternoon,” she says, then nods and says, “No, of course.”  She should go and eat and find Kirk and ask if he has any more details about what they’re supposed to be doing that for the sim but she doesn’t find herself moving from in front of Spock’s desk.

“Tomorrow?” he asks.

“I have class all day tomorrow,” she says and he quickly nods.

“Of course.”

She starts to suggest the next day, but she’s pretty sure that he has a standing meeting with Pike every week at that time, and they could do Friday, maybe, but she’s not sure if she’ll be free then since she has a paper to finish by that evening and it just seems too hard, anyway.  Not that they couldn’t meet for dinner or breakfast even though that’s kind of weird, or get coffee or tea or something else just to see each other, but it’s just too much, too different than how it was when she had all week to see him, hours and hours that they could spend working together when he wasn’t out of his office half the time teaching other courses plus whatever else he’s working on that he hasn’t mentioned, and when she wasn’t just trying to stay afloat with her assignments and midterms and simulations that really annoying cadets rope her into doing.

“It’s weird with Taele gone,” she tells him and tries to look away from how he’s holding his padd, his long fingers pressed to the back of it and his stylus in his other hand.

“It is quite an adjustment,” he agrees and his eyes catch hers as he nods and they’re so brown with the morning light how it is, the fog glowing bright and white past his window with the sun behind it.

“Look,” she starts, since he’s been back for days now and they haven’t really talked to each other, and that’s fine except that she still really wants to hear about his trip and she wants to tell him about her classes, and her semester, and everything else that he missed while he was away.

Except that maybe he doesn’t want to do that.  He’s still looking at her with that careful, close attention of his but maybe that isn’t anything, maybe this is his way of getting back to a more even footing after the mess that was this summer and maybe this distance between them is a good thing.

Which means that she probably shouldn’t have called him those two times and she shouldn’t be asking him out to lunch, the thought that she just did so making her face feel too warm.

It’s not the summer.  He’s her boss and he has expectations of her work and so she should go so that she can have lunch – by herself – get the test over with and finish her work for him, the same as if she were any cadet.  She is just any cadet. Now. To him.  His teaching assistant and former advisee and former student.

“Sorry,” she says.

“For what?” he asks, his head tipped to the side with that way he has when she’s being particularly confusing.

“I, uh-“ she says and has to stop because all she can think about is the way he kissed her goodbye, soft and light on her forehead and that’s making it hard to get words out.

And then there’s someone behind her and when she turns, it’s Lieutenant Rand again.

“Cadet,” the other woman says with a wide grin.  “Hi, how are you?”

“Lieutenant,” Nyota gets out in greeting.  Spock wasn’t kidding when he said that he has a meeting and Rand looks positively enthusiastic about it with the way she’s still smiling.  If what they’re doing is meeting.  Or getting lunch, maybe.  Probably.  Spock’s likely eating with Rand in the officer’s mess or the faculty lounge or any of those other places on campus that cadets aren’t allowed, since they both have their commissions and Nyota is going to go eat in the bigger mess hall with the rest of her classmates.

She takes a step back from them both, dragging her bag up higher on her shoulder with fingers that feel stiff and clumsy.

“I’ll talk to you later,” she tells Spock, who’s still just watching her.  In all likelihood they won’t, which is something that sits heavy in Nyota’s chest.  What she’ll actually do is see him in the office next time they’re both there, or she’ll see him in class where he gets routinely surrounded by overeager cadets.

She lets out a long breath when she gets into the hall, stopping for a moment to close her eyes and try to breathe.  It’s fine.  There’s nothing about this that isn’t fine.

She’s halfway to the turbolifts when her padd blinks and buzzes with a new message.  The subject line is written in Vulcan and she immediately opens it since it’s from Spock, not that he’s ever written to her in anything but Standard, but it’s not from him, it’s from his father saying that it was pleasant to have met her over the summer and that her paper was logically composed and she presented a cogent and compelling argument that he found quite persuasive.

Ambassador Sarek shouldn’t care about her paper, and that she can’t imagine that he does, not really.  He probably has some type of logical interest in the subject, some need to know about the topic.

Still, meeting him was nice.  Maybe a little peculiar and a rather unusual evening for her, but still pleasant. 

The entire summer was like that, even though it feels so far away now, with papers and quizzes and tests and the busyness of the Academy taking up her focus.

She needs to get her paper submitted and off her to-do list, needs to let it slip into her past like any other project she’s finished, a line on her resume and nothing more, so that her attention can be on the semester and her schoolwork and what’s right in front of her, like Kirk’s damn test that she has to get to.

She glances back towards Spock’s office door.  She can hear their voices.  Not what they’re saying, but the sound of them talking, the even cadence of Spock’s speech and the excited way that Rand is speaking, like whatever they’re working on is just that interesting that they’re both fully engaged with it.  She imagines Rand sitting in the chair in front of Spock’s desk, a padd that they’re looking at together between them, and that focus Spock gets when he works, the way his lips part and his forehead creases slightly when he’s thinking.  

She lets herself look at his door for another second and then keeps walking, tucking the padd into the bottom of her bag and trying to shrug away the emptiness that’s sitting heavy and thick in her stomach.


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to albinofrog for reading this through!

“The Klingons are closing in zero mark two four,” McCoy reports and Nyota can’t help but think ‘let them’, her stomach already twisted in knots and her hands clammy as she watches yet another simulated torpedo implode against their view screen.

It’s a disaster. Of course, her entire day has been a disaster, as well as her week and the whole semester and maybe the past year as well, everything that led up this point as she watches the readout scroll across her screen that the central subspace emitter array has been obliterated.

“Comms are down,” she calls, turning over her shoulder to see Kirk leaning forward in his chair, his hands white knuckled from his grip on the arms.

“Divert all remaining power to the shields,” he commands and Nyota glances at him again since she’s pretty sure that protocol outlines that at this point, whatever available power they have should be going to life support.

“Shields at 6 percent,” McCoy calls out.

“Stabilizers are failing,” the helmsman - Sulu, she reminds herself - announces.

The room isn’t equipped to actually toss them around as the ship tears itself apart around them, but the images on the view screen realistically pitch and spiral in a way that is slightly dizzying and might make her sick if she had bothered to eat lunch. Next to her, a spray of convincing looking sparks suddenly burst out from a terminal near the science station and the science officer - Masters, she’s pretty sure - half jumps out of her chair.

“Life support is running on auxiliary generators,” Masters reports, her voice strained. She had been so excited in the locker room as they got changed, both of them examining their uniforms and talking about the few details they knew of what awaited them. Now, the other woman’s face is drawn in concentration and Nyota can feel a bead of sweat roll between her shoulder blades.

“Uhura, open a hailing frequency,” Kirk says, not bothering to turn to look at her.

“The comms are down,” she reminds him, toggling the switch anyway. It’s a satisfying click, both on and then off again, so she does it once more even though the red indicator light continues to stubbornly blink at her and refuses to turn green.

“Sir, there’s an imminent warp core breach in the starboard nacelle,” Sulu calls, his voice rising and when she turns to look, Kirk is half standing, his hands still clenched on the arms of his chair.

“Jim, no one’s going to have time to make it to the escape pods if we don’t tell them to go now,” McCoy snaps as he furiously pokes at the panel in front of him.

“No,” Kirk says, shaking his head. “Uhura, reroute the ship wide comms through the secondary duotronic transference transducer. Sulu, drop us down to twelve mark six eight, quarter impulse. Bones transfer everything we’ve got to our photon torpedoes.”

Nyota looks at her console, then over her shoulder at Kirk, then at her console again.

Secondary duotronic transference transducer, she repeats to herself, reaching towards her controls like she has any idea what she’s going to do when her hands touch them.

Secondary, she thinks again, trying to locate the toggle for at least the primary duotronic transference transducer.

She is not going to tell Kirk that she can’t find the switch because she isn’t going to admit that she has no idea what he’s asking her to do, or what a transference transducer even is, so she puts her hand out again, clenches her fingers, holding her fist in the air above her console as she decides what exactly she’s going to press.

The lights blink off, then on again, brighter than before and she lets her hand drop to her lap, wiping her palm on her thigh and breathing out a long sigh into the sudden silence as she gives the console one more look, like the transducer control will become obvious if she just searches for it long enough.

“What?” Kirk asks, standing and looking around the room, blinking at the sudden light and the now-dark consoles and view screens. “What was that?”

“We’re dead, Jim,” McCoy says, poking at the monitor in front of him once more before leaning back in his chair.

“I think the warp core imploded,” Sulu offers as he spins around from the helm station. “Either that or their last volley of torpedoes breached our shields.”

“Breached our shields?” Kirk asks, walking towards Sulu, then spinning on his heel and starting back towards McCoy again. He rubs his hands together, then raises one to scrub over his jaw. “But we had enough power to… Uhura did you get the comm call off?”

She licks at her lips and meets his piercing, bright blue stare. “I-“

The lights blink off again so that only a strip of illumination near the door is left, and she swallows, unsure of what she would have said if she had to have answered.

“That will be all, Cadets,” a voice says over the speakers affixed to the back of the room, up near the windows where a handful of officers are watching from.

The door opens and Kirk stares at it, unmoving. Nobody else moves, either, not until McCoy stands up, takes Kirk by the arm and steers him out into the hallway.

In the locker room, Nyota finds that the undershirt she wore is damp with sweat, soaked through in places.

“That was something,” Masters says from the locker next to her and Nyota nods as she pulls her skirt on, her mind still stuck on what the hell a transference transducer might be.

She can hear Kirk before she leaves the locker room, the pitch of his voice carrying through the closed door.

“But what does this mean?” Kirk’s asking when she gets into the hall. He hasn’t changed and he’s waving a filmplast he’s holding and pointing back towards the simulator room.

“Your evaluation, Cadet,” the woman who’s speaking to Kirk says and from her voice, it sounds like she’s repeated herself more than once now.

“But this is all? Where’s the rest of it? When do we get the rest of it?”

“As I said, you will receive a more thorough description tonight.”

“But this doesn’t-“

“Cadet,” the woman says. “That is enough.”

“But…” Kirk starts, only to stop as the other woman starts walking away, clearly done with the conversation.

It’s Rand, Nyota realizes as the other woman walks towards her, and then past her, Nyota’s own feet stuck to the floor so that she just slowly pivots as she watches the Lieutenant glance at her and then away again, disappearing into a door that quickly shuts behind her.

“Look,” Kirk says and she finds that he’s shoved the filmplast in front of her, though when he moved that close to her she doesn't know.

“What is this?” she asks, yanking it from him and scanning it through once, then again, then a third time, blinking at it like that will help it resolve itself into something that doesn’t have a long, long list of errors.

“Complete loss of crew,” McCoy reads, coming around to peer over her shoulder. “Failure to rescue the stranded vessel. Inability to successfully establish contact with enemy ships-“

“-Just take it,” Nyota says, shoving it into his hand and moving away from both of them. They’re too close to her, standing there in the hallway and she feels like her heart hasn’t stopped hammering ever since the first volley hit them, and it isn’t slowing now, not with that filmplast in McCoy’s hand.

“-Loss of life on stranded vessel, failure to execute evasive maneuvers, insufficient rerouting of ship’s auxiliary systems to life support, inferior negotiation strategy with enemy combatants,” McCoy continues as Kirk stares around, his eyes slightly too wide.

“That’s unfair,” Sulu says, taking the sheet from McCoy as if he reads it again, more closely, it will say something else.

“C’mon, Jim,” McCoy says, his hand on Kirk’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be ok.”

“But aren’t you mad?” Kirk asks, trying to shove McCoy’s hand off, though he won’t remove it, just keeps Kirk standing there even though it looks like Kirk would rather be pacing and storming around the hallway. “That’s just it? A list of things we did wrong?”

“Jim, calm down,” McCoy says as Kirk’s voice keeps rising.

“They can’t just-“ Kirk points towards the simulator room with both hands in a way that is slightly wild. “The way it- And then-“

“-Jim-“

“-This is-“

“Stop,” Nyota hears herself say but Kirk just shakes his head and moves like he’s going to take a step towards the closed door Rand disappeared through.

“But-“ Kirk says. He’s getting increasingly red, a flush staining his cheeks and spreading down his neck, McCoy’s hand on him doing nothing to calm him down.

“Kirk-“ she starts.

“-They can’t-”

“Stop,” she says again and takes a step towards him this time. She’s seen him like his once too often, mostly at a bar and mostly when he’s about to pick a fight, not when he’s in a uniform. And even though he’s changed since he’s gotten to the Academy - grown up more than she cares to admit - and even though these instances are getting rarer, the man she met in Iowa is still there underneath his Starfleet training, still fiery and rough and hard edged.

He looks like he’s about to walk back into the simulator room and demand that it be turned on again, that they get a second chance, because there’s no possibility in which their assessment is the final one.

She has half a mind to let him. It’s his career and his grave if he wants to dig it and she could walk away.

She wants to. Should, probably. But she also meets McCoy’s eyes and takes a step towards Kirk.

“Stop,” she tells him again and steps in front of him like she’s somehow going to be able to physically keep him from walking in there if that’s what he decides to do.

“I-“

“Cool it,” she tells him and puts her hand on the center of his chest when he takes a step forward. He’s strong, but not like Spock is, none of that wiry power in his frame, and none of that hard heat coming through his uniform. He’s also less still, less composed, and she has to give him a shove to get him to stop moving.

“Move, Uhura-“

“No. There’s nothing you can do, and you need to stop, right now.”

“But-“

“-No, Kirk-“

“-Cause Pike said-“

“-It’s ok,” she tells him, though she can’t help but wonder what exactly Pike said to him. Odd to remember that they’re so close, like Kirk’s Pike is somehow someone other than the Pike she spent so much time with over the summer, the one Spock works with, talks about.

Not that it matters, because it doesn’t. Pike’s not here and Spock isn’t either, and it’s her and Kirk, who’s only turning redder, and McCoy and Sulu.

She makes herself catch Kirk’s eye until she’s sure that he’s really seeing her.

“It’s ok, Kirk, you’re good, right?”

It takes a long second, longer than she thinks it should, but finally he nods and she feels some of the fight go out of him.

McCoy moves forward again, both hands on Kirk’s shoulders, and the silence that falls is heavy. It makes Nyota realize how tired she is, how tightly she’s wound, and how her heart still hasn’t slowed down yet.

“When do we get our grades?” she asks into the quiet, the only sound in the room Kirk’s harsh breath.

“That’s it,” he answers, pointing at the sheet Sulu’s still holding. “We get more later, but that’s basically it.”

“That’s just a checklist,” she points out. She raises her hand to rub her fingers into her forehead, waiting for Kirk to explain.

“No, that’s it, that’s what we got back,” he says, waving towards it, then closing his eyes tight, his cheeks and neck still flushed red.

She looks at it again for a long moment, then reaches out and pulls it from Sulu’s hands.

“They didn’t even grade it,” she points out, running her finger down the column that she hadn’t noticed before, where a neat red ‘x’ is placed next to each bullet point.

“They did,” Kirk says, snatching it from her and shaking it.

“There’s no grade there,” she says again, wanting to grab it back but she can’t get her hands to move, not when the sight of all those little red ‘x’s are swimming in her vision.

“Exactly,” Kirk says and she hears him dimly, his voice sounding far away from her right then. “There’s no grade, we didn’t even earn a grade.”

“But they-“ she starts, cutting herself off when McCoy starts shaking his head.

“It means that we failed, all of us,” he says.

She stares at him for long enough that she takes in the silence of the room, the stillness of how Kirk is looking at her, the echoing of her pulse pounding in her ears.

“I’m going,” she tells them, turns, and walks away.

“Wait, wait,” Kirk says, calling after her as she heads for the door. “Uhura, wait up.”

“No.”

“But we should go talk to them about this, they can’t just fail us.”

“They can. They did,” she hears herself say. She watches the door draw nearer to her the longer she walks towards it, gray and innocuous.

“Uhura can we-“ Kirk starts, jogging around her until he’s between her and the door.

“No,” she says again, hears her voice say it, feels her mouth shape the word. It sounds harsh, feels dull and low in her throat. She keeps walking, feeling underneath the stillness, the pounding, sickening slam of her heart in her chest, a cold, hard emptiness building in her.

It’s sunny outside. Blindingly, brilliantly sunny and she stands on the steps for a long moment, blinking up at the bright blue sky, hearing the soft breeze, and watching the cadets and officers cross the quad.

All she can see are those small, red ’x’s and all she can feel is the beat of her blood.

She tells herself to take a breath, to breathe in steady and slow but she doesn’t feel the answering rise of her chest and her vision doesn’t clear, so she’s not sure if she’s inhaled or not.

It’s not until she has jogged up the steps to the library that she realizes that’s where she was headed, and it’s not until she’s reached the top floor, the spot in the back where it’s quiet and calm and peaceful that she stops walking, the end of the stacks in front of her so that she’s out of anywhere else to go.

There’s a table there, one that she works at often, and she watches her hand reach forward and pull the chair out, watches herself place her bag on it and take out her padd with the slides loaded onto it, her notes for her Cardassian test, and her outline for her paper. She arranges them neatly, precisely on the table, sets her bag on the floor, and sits.

Try as she might, she can’t lose herself in her work like she normally does, not when she can’t ignore the dried sweat on her skin and the hammer of her heart that won’t quiet. Except that every time she stops, every time her focus wanders and she sets her stylus down and pushes her padd away, she sees that row of red ‘x’s again, which makes her reach for her work and tug it back towards her, willing the image to fade from her mind in the monotony of studying.

It’s after she’s done sorting through her Cardassian materials and is halfway through the first set of the slides that her eyes start to burn and she realizes that she’s just been staring at her work for too long, longer than she really has any sense of without actually completing anything, her mind blank and empty. She rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes, pressing until she sees stars, listening to the silence around her, the ragged sound of her own breathing.

Then her stomach growls, overly loud in the quiet and she drops her hands, pressing on her abdomen like that will still the sound.

She blinks, first at her work in front of her and then at her little corner of the library, thinking that it’s darker than she thought it was, and when she turns to peer out the window, it’s not that the sun has gone behind a cloud like she guessed, but rather that night has fallen without her having noticed. There’s one last blueish red blush of day staining the sky, but the lights around campus have come on, casting long shadows across the quad. She thinks that she should be curious about where the rest of the afternoon and evening have gone, but she’s not, a heavy hollowness replacing any attempt to wonder at how long she’s been sitting there, still and unmoving.

She should go get dinner. She should go get dinner, go for a run, shower, and go to bed, except that she’s not done with the slides, nor studying for her test.

She leans back in her chair, staring at the ceiling for a long time, scraping her teeth along her bottom lip over and over until it feels rubbed raw.

It’s fine. She’s fine. Everything is fine, except that when she closes her eyes, all she can see is that filmplast in McCoy’s hand and all she can hear is Kirk asking her to reroute the comms, and all she can feel is a sick churn in her stomach.

She shoves her padds into her bag, slings it over her shoulder and pushes her chair in hard enough that it makes a satisfying thunk as it meets the edge of the table.

Campus is thankfully quiet as she leaves the library, only a handful of other students out on the quad and she looks around herself, unsure of whether it’s really that late or if everyone else is just at dinner. She could check the time, but she doesn’t, just keeps walking and listening to the sound of her boots on the pavement.

The silence and stillness of campus is calming, and it’s better that her dorm is just as quiet. It lets her think and helps to settle the rushing in her mind. She needs to focus, to get her studying done so that she can finish the slides, so that she can get to bed, wake up and get back to her homework, go to the office, go to class, take her exam, and get done with everything so that she can finish her paper, turn it in and have all weekend to get started on her reading for next week. She wants her own bed and her own desk and to put down the bag she’s had with her since she left that morning, and to just be able to finally close her eyes against the day, whenever it is that she’s done with her work. Soon, maybe. If she can get herself to pay attention to it, and make her thoughts stop buzzing.

She blows out a long breath and rubs at her forehead as she opens the door to her room and walks in.

And then turns back around again, her hand pressed over her eyes.

“Fuck,” she hears.

“-Sorry, sorry-“

“-We just-“

“-You were out-“

“-Why aren’t you at dinner?”

“We thought you were at dinner.”

“Did you,” Nyota says, trying not to listen to the sound of Gaila and Kirk scrambling for their clothes. “No, really, don’t stop, I’m going.”

“Wait-“ she hears Gaila say.

The door slides closed quietly behind her, leaving her alone in the hallway, their voices still coming from the room behind her.

It only takes a moment and then Gaila’s there, dressed in what very might well be Kirk’s shirt and a pair of shorts that Nyota is reasonably sure belonged to her at some point.

“I’m sorry,” Gaila says, letting the door close behind her again. “I really didn’t know when you’d be back.”

“No, it’s fine,” Nyota says. “I wasn’t-“

She can’t find the words to finish that sentence and just ends up shrugging, dragging her bag up higher on her shoulder.

“I’ll kick him out,” Gaila offers, watching her too closely, too concerned and Nyota has to look away.

“No, don’t. Thanks, but I really do have more work to do.”

“Jim said that it didn’t go well.”

Nyota swallows, and then has to swallow again since the first time didn’t unstick her throat.

“It was fine,” she says. She starts to elaborate and finds that she can’t, whatever words she’s searching for not actually coming.

Gaila moves closer and Nyota thinks she might hug her, but she doesn’t, just looks at her softly.

“You ok?”

“I just have a lot to get done for tomorrow,” Nyota says, the words coming fast and typical for her, something she’s said a dozen, a hundred times, even if now it feels forced and like it takes extra work to get it out.

“You want to talk about it?”

Nyota nearly nods again, but her body feels too empty, too wrung out and drained to manage the motion. The idea of summoning the effort to explain everything feels overwhelming, so she just lets her eyes drift closed and manages the slightest shake of her head.

Gaila waits a long time after that, but Nyota stays silent and eventually Gaila reaches out to squeeze her arm, then walks back into their room.

She could turn around, walk back in there, and make Kirk leave. She could tell Gaila everything about her day, the sim, how much work she has, how she has a sick, clawing feeling in her chest that she won’t be able to get it all done, that she’s likely to be up all night and even then might not do well on her Cardassian exam, and might then be too tired to do as good a job on her paper as she wants to.

She could lay all that out, let Gaila’s good humor and charm buoy her forward and cheer her up, like her roommate is offering to do.

She should. She tells herself to, but doesn’t find herself moving, and the longer she stands there and listens to the sound of their voices through the door, the less she wants to be there.

Except that she doesn’t want to be anywhere else either, not back in the library and not in the mess hall, and not the student union, and not the Xenolinguistics lab, and not even McCoy’s room, even though she’s sure he’d let her in, would commiserate with her about Kirk, the amount of work they have, and everything else that comes with being a cadet. It’s just that as much as she can imagine herself walking over there and wrapping her knuckles on his door jamb, asking if it’s ok if she hangs out for a couple hours, she can no more bring herself to actually take those steps down the hallway than she can open the door to her room again and demand that Kirk leave.

Which is fine. She’ll just stay in the hallway for the foreseeable future. She’ll stand right there with her back pressed against the wall, and her eyes closed and an aching throb in her head. It’s a good plan. A great plan, really, because then she doesn’t have to look at her work that she still has to do, and she doesn’t have to think about tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, when nobody else in her seminars and lectures have ever had to look at a row of red ‘x’s in a neat, straight column.

She’s halfway back to the building that houses the sims before she realizes what she’s doing. By the time she does, it’s too hard to stop, the momentum that’s carrying her forward impossible to arrest.

She walks past the spot on the steps outside where Kirk introduced her to Sulu before the sim started, the table and chairs right inside the lobby where they sat until McCoy and Masters got there, and the doorway that leads to the hall with the locker rooms and the sim room.

“Can I help you?” she hears behind her and realizes she’s been just blankly staring at the door to the sim for longer than is probably normal.

She turns to find Lieutenant Rand standing in nearly the same place she was earlier that day, but instead of a filmplast in her hand she’s holding a bag of what must be take-out, since the smell of the food is making Nyota’s stomach turn in a way that might be hunger but feels a lot like nausea.

“I was-“ she starts, then has to stop again since she doesn’t have words to explain what she was doing, since she really doesn’t know. Looking at the door. Standing in the hallway. Now, staring at the other woman, at the small smile on her face that Nyota guesses is friendly, welcoming almost, though she feels none of that warmth actually reach her.

She clears her throat and lets her tongue work around her mouth before succeeding in saying, “I was wondering if our grades are available.”

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Rand says. “We’ll be sending them to you when they are.”

“Of course.”

She should have known that, should have expected that would be the case. She suddenly is aware of how odd it is that she’s there in the first place, that she walked all the way over to the simulation building when it’s nowhere near where she normally spends time on campus.

She tries to find a graceful way to excuse herself, rather than just walking away like she wants to without another word or another moment spent looking at the Lieutenant, when the other woman speaks.

“You did really well,” Rand says and takes a small step closer. Nyota has to keep herself from backing up.

“Thank you,” she makes herself say. Of course Rand probably watched, she realizes. She was there earlier, armed with that filmplast right after the sim ended. She was likely up in that room, somewhere that Nyota couldn’t see her, watching every moment of their test fall apart, every single wrong decision that they made and every bad choice.

“And you speak Klingon really well,” Rand adds and Nyota can’t help but feel uneasy and tense, vulnerable in a way that she doesn’t like at the idea of the Lieutenant having seen all of that.

“Thank you,” Nyota says again, the words rote and stiff even to her own ears.

“It’s a tough test,” Rand continues.

“If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have work to get to.”

Rand gives her another small smile and Nyota watches her walk away, disappearing into the room that she had gone into earlier.

It’s easier to just keep standing there, but the smell of the food is still making her stomach knot so she gets herself to walk back the way she came, down the hallway, towards the door to the lobby in the front of the building. She’s halfway to it, wondering exactly where it is that she’s going to go when it opens and Spock walks into the hallway. She has to blink at him for a moment, some slow, sluggish part of herself trying to answer why he’s there, while the rest of her tries to not remember how it’s been between them the last few times she’s seen him.

Not good is the answer, rising to the forefront of her mind, and as much as she tries to push it back, it’s all that she can think about, the silence that has grown between them, that has replaced what, she doesn’t know. Something warmer, easier, so that no matter how hard the summer was at least they spoke to each other, at least she talked to him all the time, knew where he was, what he was up to, what was going on with him and she wasn’t running into him in random buildings around campus, unsure of what to say now that he’s there.

“Hi,” she gets out and manages a weary sort of half wave, thinking that he looks surprised to see her there and that she might feel the same way if she felt anything at all.

He’s holding food, too, something that she registers dully as she also takes in his instructor’s uniform, the two padds he’s holding along with a container of what has to be soup.

It makes her think that another day, another time, a different place from right then and there and now, she would have smiled at that, might have had something to say about it. Instead she looks beyond him, out at the door she was walking towards and listens to the silence of the room, the sound of her own breathing, the quiet rustle of movement as he takes a step closer to her. She feels something blank and vacant and missing in her chest, her stomach, an absence that wasn’t ever there before and is now sitting lodged deep inside of her.

His jacket fits him so well, the collar dark against the pale skin of his neck, the fabric hugging his slim torso. She thinks about what it feels like to touch, the way the warmth of his body seeps through the cloth.

“Are you well?” she hears him ask and she thinks for a moment that he’s going to move towards her again.

She starts to tell him that she is, then begins to amend that to say that she’s at least fine, then tries to find any actual measure of truth in that and can’t, so she just lets her mouth work over words that don’t come before letting out a long, slow exhalation. She lets the breath leave herself instead of saying anything, since holding it in is too much, even though she wants to tell him, wants to let it all spill out of her like how she might have over the summer, all those talks they had, coming more and more frequently up until he left so abruptly.

“Nyota?” he asks, his voice soft.

“I have to go work on your slides,” she tells him, hearing the weariness in her own voice. She looks at him, then outside again, since trying to maintain eye contact with him is just too big an effort.

“Now?”

“I haven’t finished them,” she says, wishing she didn’t have to clarify. “I’m sorry I- I tried to get through them but I-“

“You do not have to-“

“No, no, I’m almost done. I’ll finish them now, tonight or by the morning at the latest.”

She could ask him if it's ok that she puts them off until the next day, or the weekend even, and she might if it were still summer, if it was like how it was between them then, instead of how it is now, whatever existed between them, as confusing and bizarre as it had been, now altered. Lessened, somehow, even though she’s not entirely sure how that even happened, what exactly occurred that seems so off in a way that it never had been.

When she drags her attention back to him, he’s looking at her with his head slightly tipped to the side as if he’s waiting to see if she’s going to speak again. She shouldn’t have interrupted him she knows, but it’s hard not to, to simply erase all those hours they spent together where she could talk to him how she wanted to.

When she keeps quiet, he continues on. “I was referring to why you had not simply accessed the previous versions of the files and sent them to me.”

“What previous versions?”

“Of the files.” When she doesn’t answer, just shakes her head, he says, “You are recreating them over again?”

“That’s what you asked me to do.”

“I simply wanted a copy of the ones I used last semester.”

She stares up at him, unable to fully process what he’s telling her, not when she can barely make sense of it. “Why didn’t you say that?”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“I-“ he starts, then pauses, his brows drawing together. “You can simply retrieve them from the memory files on your padd. It should not take you more than a moment.”

“Oh.” She nods, shifts the weight of her bag on her shoulder. “Ok.”

He’s still watching her closely, his attention focused and intent on her.

“You have been…” He doesn’t finish the sentence and with him looking at her like that she suddenly feels silly, stupid that she didn’t realize what he really wanted, that after all this time she didn’t just think of it on her own, all those hours she spent working on them and that never occurred to her.

“I’ll send them to you,” she makes herself say. She doesn’t know how to get to the older versions of files, but she can figure it out, or Gaila can.

Except that thinking about Gaila just makes Nyota ache for her own bed, even as unsure as she is that she has it in herself to go back to her dorm and see if Kirk is gone, if she really has the strength to get him to leave, to even talk to him or see him again today.

She pulls her bag up higher on her shoulder, trying to put the thought of her room out of her mind, and trying not to let any memory of Spock fill in its place, not when the only thing they’re talking about is work, and when that’s all they’ve talked about since he’s been back, even those few conversations they had over the comm while he was gone regulated to another place, a past that feels all too far away, a dim echo of what it was all like before the semester began.

“I’ll do that right now,” she tells him, and can’t quite get herself to look at him, not when she feels so incredibly foolish that something so obvious completely escaped her, so instead she stares at the middle of his chest, then thinks that she shouldn’t be doing that, so shifts her gaze downwards, towards the container he’s holding and his padds.

“There is no immediate need,” she hears him say but she’s not really listening because she’s still staring at his food, and the top padd, which she’s seen before on his bookshelf in his apartment, while he showered and she stood in his living room trying to figure out what to do with herself, back when it was awkward and uncomfortable between them, but not at all like it is now, not this distance that has grown that she doesn’t know what to do with.

“You’re here for dinner,” she says and as soon as she’s gotten the words out, she finds that she’s taken a step back from him, her focus still on his padd. “You’re eating dinner with Rand.”

“We are not-“ His head tips to the side and she watches the way his eyes cut over towards the closed door. “It would be inaccurate to assume that- Your statement carries an erroneous connotation that she and I are-“

“-You’re here to see Rand,” Nyota says and she’s not listening to him, can’t hear him over the sudden, instant pounding of her pulse in her ears. “You’re- you two are - you’re working with her.”

His eyes are wide and dark and he blinks twice, rapidly, before he nods, the motion arrested, abrupt and short.

“The sim,” Nyota says, hears her voice say it clear and steady into the hallway between them. “You’re grading the test with her because you work on it together.” Listening to her own words builds a certainty that was never there, a truth she never knew until she hears herself say it, until she looks at that padd he’s holding again, the one on Klingon warfare that had been sitting out of place and mismatched among his computer science texts. “You work on that- you’re… You’re the programmer. For the Kobayashi Maru. You programmed that test and you’re grading it right now.”

“Nyota-“

There’s enough room in the hallway for her to walk past him without touching, without coming close to him at all.

The door opens too silently, too smoothly for the hot jump in her chest, for the coiled energy rising in her that makes her want to slam it against the wall. She feels her chest rise sharply, hears the tile clip under the strike of her boots as she walks through the lobby.

“Nyota,” she hears him say again, from behind her this time. It sounds like he’s right there, close to her, though she doesn’t turn to look, just keeps walking towards the darkness that’s fallen over campus, the coolness of night that she knows is waiting beyond the door to the building.

“I have to go finish my work,” she tells him without slowing down for him or breaking her stride.

There’s a knot of hot, tight anger in her chest, syrupy and thick and she can feel it sitting at the base of her throat, can feel it pushing at her, pulsing through her body.

“There is no need tonight for you to-“

She stops right before the door, everything in her coiled, too still and too contained, so that when she speaks her voice is too calm and too even, cold and exacting, the words carefully spoken into the silence between them.

“You couldn’t have mentioned that last week?”

She turns towards him and watches him take a step back from her with a detachment, an objectivity that allows her to take in the way he swallows, the way his lips part as he watches her carefully.

“Pardon?”

“You- you knew that it was taking me forever to get the slides done and-“ She takes a deep, long breath and hears how it shakes.

“I thought that-“

“-You knew I was busy all afternoon and that I have assignments due this week and you couldn’t just tell me that?” She stares at him for a moment, feeling heat rise fast and bubbling through her chest.

“Nyota-“

“No.” She holds up a hand and the motion is enough to cut off whatever he was going to say. “Were you there today, Spock? Were you- did you watch that whole sim?”

“Nyota, it was impossible to-“

“Did you all watch us afterwards, in the hallway? Beforehand? Did you think that just possibly you could have mentioned to me that-“

“-It would be against regulations to-“

“-And you knew I was going to fail it? That we all were, right? That I was going to walk in there and fuck, Spock, I talked to you this morning and all week and you knew - you knew - that it was going to get added to my scores and my class ranking and you didn’t tell me, you just let me-“ She has to breathe, has to pull in air past the catch in her throat. “You didn’t tell me that was going to happen and you didn’t tell me not to do it in the first place, I asked you and you didn’t say anything, just watched and-“

“-Nyota, please.”

But she can feel it all welling in her, everything about today and the past week and the past month rising through her chest and throat with such force that holding it in would be harder than just letting it flow out.

“No, this is- you didn’t tell me. I asked you and you didn’t say anything and you knew full well what it was going to be like. You made it like that, didn’t you. This is-“ She’s shaking her head and moving a step back from him before she realizes she’d done it, her tongue pressed into her lower lip as she stares up at him. “You knew exactly - exactly - down to the minute what that would be like and you knew that Kirk didn’t know what he was doing and you just sat by while we all walked in there.”

“Nyota, I could not tell you any specifics,” he says and she doesn’t care how low his voice is, how soft it sounds or how he’s looking at her because she’s not looking back, can’t and won’t listen to him. “Regulations dictate that-“

“Stop _talking_.”

“Even if I had not programmed it, as a commissioned officer-“

“God,” she says, digging her thumb and forefinger in to her eyes. “Please stop.”

He does and she listens to herself breathing, feels her blood beat under her skin, in her ears as she swallows down the hot, fiery ache that’s lodged in her chest.

“It was not my intention to cause you any distress.”

“It’s fine,” she bites out and squeezes her eyes shut, except that the minute she closes them all she can see is that row of red ’x’s.

“Fuck,” she says again and wants the word to feel better than it does, wants it to be cathartic instead of just hollow. She wants to scrub her fingers into her eyes again, but doesn’t, instead reaches for a nearby chair, curling her fingers hard and tight around the back of it, letting them dig into it in a way that is slightly painful, makes her hand ache with the force. “You knew this was going to happen.”

At least he hesitates, but that doesn’t stop him from agreeing.

“I did.”

Her head is throbbing and pounding in a sickening, dizzying way, making it difficult to stand there, so that she perches on the edge of the chair before letting herself sink down into it, her body heavy and leaden, the sound her throat makes as she gets herself to swallow loud in her own ears.

She’s sure he’s still standing there, hasn’t heard him walk away, but she doesn’t take her focus off of the floor in front of her, staring blearily at the neat rows of tile, polished smooth and clean into a bright shine under the lobby lights.

His boots tap against the tile as she listens to him take a step either towards or away from her. She doesn’t look up to find out which.

“You performed admirably. Exemplary. You exceeded the staff’s expectations, especially as a third year student.”

“We got blown up ten minutes into it.”

“Which is longer than average.”

“Great. Good thing it wasn’t nine minutes and forty three seconds, then. What do you do, go home and calculate the standard deviation of how long it takes for cadets to lose their shit and watch all their hard work in all of their classes slide down the drain?”

“You remain upset.”

“Damn right.”

“Nyota-“

“Spock, I failed.”

“That is immaterial.”

She props her elbows on her knees, lowers her head to her palms and stares down at her skirt, the one that she put on that morning before she left for Spock’s office, before she ever walked into that simulator room.

“Not to me it isn’t,” she says to her lap.

She hears him take another step closer.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.”

He doesn’t leave right away and she waits for him to, counting her pulse, which she can still feel pounding in her, and anticipating the fall of his steps across the tile.

“Very well,” he finally says, his voice gentle and close to her, so that the shift of his uniform, the first rap of his boot on the tile is nearly indiscernible under it.

It makes her stomach turn once, and then again, the sound of him walking away too much to bear or to wait for and she wishes he would just go, just get it over with and be gone so that she doesn’t have to listen to the silence before his next step, and so that she doesn’t have to imagine the third and then the forth as he leaves, the hiss of the door as it opens and then closes again behind him.

The sound of his footsteps is so familiar to her now and she’s braced for it, caught in the moment just before he leaves that hangs for an eternity, except that in the time between his first step and the next that are coming, she’s reached out towards him, feels herself raise her hand and catch the edge of his sleeve.

“I-” she starts, staring at her fingers where they’ve snagged his cuff, his hand so close to hers that she can feel the warmth coming off of his skin.

She makes herself let go, but when his arm draws away away from her, she says, “Don’t.”

He waits a long moment in which she struggles for what to say next.

“Do not what?” he finally asks and she shakes her head, staring at the place on his sleeve that she just grabbed, unsure of why she stopped him and what to do now, why she wanted him to stay and what she is going to say to him now that he’s still standing right there, no desk between them like how it is in his office, and no span of light-years, just him a half an arm’s length away, staring at her.

“I didn’t-“ She tries to keep speaking, can’t, and just gestures to him, then to herself, back and forth between them. She presses her lips together, stares past him, out across the room and tries to breathe. “I’m sorry, I-“ She manages a ragged, shaky and shivering inhale, trying to land on what to say to him, searching for what words want to come out right then, even though she can’t find them, can’t drag anything out of herself beyond, “You shouldn’t let me yell at you like that.“

“I assure you that I have grown quite accustomed to such an occurrence.” She’s not looking at him while he says it, but over the summer he would have smiled while making a similar comment in that way of his, where she always has to look closely to see if that’s what he was really doing.

Something harsh leaves the back of her throat in a rush of air. She raises her hand to rub at her temples with her thumb and forefinger, covering her eyes even though she hasn’t been looking at him. “You know me. Impatient, irritable, and bad tempered.”

“Choleric?” he asks and she has to shut her eyes because she feels suddenly, horribly like she’s going to cry, the catch in her throat resolving itself into an ache, the burning in her eyes starting to prick and it’s a struggle to prevent her lips from trembling.

“Definitely.”

The roll of a chair across the tile is nearly imperceptible, the sound of him setting his padds on the floor slightly louder as he sits down.

“That is not what I think of you,” he says and she hears how softly he’s speaking and he must have leaned even closer, but she’s shut her eyes, has pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and refuses to look at him.

“Commander?” someone calls and she hears it over the shaking, trembling of her breath.

She waits for him to stand up again, waits to hear him pick up his things again, but the sounds don’t come.

“Is your roommate currently available?” he asks instead, but it only makes her press her fingers into the corner of her eyes harder, makes her shoulders rise, and makes what air she can get in hitch in her chest.

“She’s-“ Nyota starts, and squeezes her eyes shut tighter, like she can somehow stop the hot tears from wetting her fingers. “No.”

“Commander Spock?”

“I will be there in a moment,” he answers, raising his voice this time, his tone brisk and crisp, no room for argument in his words.

“May I speak to you later this evening?” he asks, softer, low and quiet and right next to her.

“You don’t-“ she starts, trying to get the words out and keep the tears in and speak past the ache that’s sitting in the back of her throat. “You don’t talk to me anymore.”

“Nyota…”

He doesn’t, not while he was gone and not since he’s been back, a silence between them that was never there before growing in the weeks that have passed since the beginning of the semester, the end of the summer when Taele left and whatever it was that existed between Spock and herself evaporated in Puri’s shout down the street, the excited flurry of them leaving for the ship.

She drags her forefingers under her eyes and wipes them on her skirt. “You have to go.”

“Where will you be?” he asks and when she doesn’t, won’t answer, asks, “You are returning to your dorm?”

“No.”

She knows he’s waiting for her to elaborate but she doesn’t, just wipes her hand under her nose and wishes for a tissue, the bathroom, her room to be empty, the sim to have never happened, for the summer, free of classes and work and failed tests.

She has to look at the napkin he’s holding out to her for a long time before she realizes that it’s for her, and that she can take it.

“I’m fine,” she tells him, but he doesn’t stop holding it out and she finally just grabs it since it seems like he’s not going to retract the offer. Except that the only thing she can think about as she wipes her face is that the reason he has a napkin because he’s about to have dinner while he grades with Rand and probably other officers as well, a host of his colleagues that watched her during the test, and that they’re going to be having dinner while they do it, which just reminds her of the meals they shared, all those times that she ate with him, their work spread between them, those hours they spent together. She looks at his container of food, then away again, her lips threatening to shake so that she has to press them together, hard.

“Where are you going now?” he asks and she feels her breath catch and hitch in her throat as she shrugs.

“The library?” he finally supplies and she shakes her head before she even realizes that she doesn’t want to go there.

“I-“ she starts, the word shuddery and uncertain. “Gaila has Kirk in our room.”

“I see.”

She balls up the napkin and fists her hand around it, feeling it bunch against her palm, slightly damp on her skin.

“I have an exam tomorrow,” she tells him, since that’s easier than explaining how little she wants to get Gaila to get Kirk to leave. Gaila would kick Kirk out, she knows, but it’s just too much, too hard to even think about asking her to do that, and then Nyota would have to be with Gaila all night and either talk about everything or endure gentle, sympathetic looks which might actually be worse.

“You intend to continue studying this evening,” he says and it’s not a question, not after he’s come to know her as well as he has.

She nods and looks outside at the lights that line the campus paths, one of which she’s going to have to walk down when she leaves there, when she gets herself to stand up and pick her bag back up and smooth her skirt and walk back outside, into the bustle of campus, of other students and professors.

“If it would be convenient,” he says, then pauses and that hesitation makes her listen, makes her look up at him and take in the way he’s watching her, his eyes so soft that it makes her throat ache again. “It should be apparent that my quarters are currently empty and will be for some time tonight.”

“I can’t do that,” she says immediately, automatically, but her throat is burning again, hot and sore with a pang that reaches down to her stomach.

“Nyota,” he says and his voice is so quiet, so low and gentle that she closes her eyes.

He’s right next to her, close enough that she can very nearly feel him there, closer than he has been since he left all those weeks ago at the end of a summer that never should have happened, never should have been like how it was, and the beginning of a fall that has been hard, difficult in a way that she never would have thought it could be.

His hand comes to rest on her knee and she stares at how his fingers look against her skin, watching as he tightens his grip very slightly, feeling the press of his palm into her. She stares down at his hand for a long time, long enough that she can feel the way heat spreads across her skin and she can study how neat his nails are, the veins on the back of his hand before her own hand is suddenly covering his, so that her fingers, her wrist, half of her arm warm at the contact.

“Please let me help you,” he says and she should maybe go, should stand up and move away from him, but she doesn’t, can’t. Instead, she thinks of the night air as she said goodbye to him, and she thinks of when he was gone, and she thinks of putting more distance between them, pulling her hand from his but doesn’t, just lets herself lean forward to rest her forehead against the hard ridge of his collarbone, his hand rising to rest on the back of her neck, holding her there against him, his touch familiar, comforting in its warmth and strength.

She closes her eyes, swallows, and pulls in a breath, then another one until she feels calmer, steadier, like that pain and hurt and burning, jumping in her chest won’t actually be there forever.

“Let me guess, it’s unlocked?” she asks into his uniform. The fabric is soft and heated from his body and she leans more of her weight into him, lets out a shaky exhale.

She feels him nod, so close that when he breathes she can feel it against her skin, and when he turns towards her slightly, shifts nearly imperceptibly, she thinks it might be a kiss that he presses into her hair.

His fingers tighten on her neck, just the gentlest pressure, and over her knee slightly firmer and then his touch is gone and she listens to him walk away. She doesn’t look up until she’s sure he’s out of sight, until all that’s left is the chair he moved over, still placed there next to her.


	28. Chapter 28

The wash of heat that hits her as soon as she opens his door is familiar to her, but does nothing to stop the throb of her headache, so that the first thing she does is toe off her shoes, walk into his kitchen and open the cupboard next to the sink.

And then she stands there for a long time staring up at the glasses on the top shelf, placed higher than she can reach.

She closes her eyes so that she doesn’t have to look at them, feels her hand tighten over the knob she’s holding and lets out a breath, her exhale the only sound in the quiet of his apartment. 

“Of course,” she finally says into the silence, nobody else there to hear her. Or to see her, thankfully, as she gracelessly stretches to nudge a glass forward far enough that she’s able to grab it.

She fills it, drinks it straight down, then fills it again, holding it between both hands and turning back towards the rest of Spock’s apartment, unsure of what to do next now that she’s there.

Work is why she came, why she got herself to stand up after he had left, and what she had told herself as she walked not back towards her own dorm but to the faculty quarters instead, but the thought of pulling out her padd makes her head throb again, and she sips at her water, trying to quell the ache.

It’s odd to be there without him, stranger even than the first time she ever came all that time ago, when he was injured and irritated and had left her similarly alone as he showered. But back then, he had at least been in the other room and now he’s halfway across campus, leaving his apartment with a peculiar emptiness, one that echoes the numbness that’s still blanking her thoughts, helping her not think too hard about the ache that lingers under it, the pulse of hurt sitting in her chest that swells, pushes at her and makes her throat sore, makes it hard to swallow.

She pads across the floor to his desk, trying to remember the last time she was alone in her dorm room. The other day for a few minutes before Gaila came back, and the day before that except that Kirk had come by looking to hang out, and McCoy had been hanging around lately as well since he was taking one of the required engineering courses and had taken to trying to locate Gaila at all hours of the day. Now, though, there’s nobody that’s going to come walking in, and whenever it is that Spock’s coming back, it didn’t sound like it would be anytime soon.

Which leaves her standing in the middle of his living room, staring at his desk and holding a glass of water, the stillness and calm of his space settling and peaceful, no matter how turned inside out and tender the day has left her, so that she feels as if sandpaper was taken to her until she was left rubbed raw and exposed.

She looks over at his bookshelf where that padd on Klingon warfare had been sitting, back in the summer when she was never going to be here again, when the semester seemed far off and theoretical, a different piece of her life entirely from standing in her advisor’s living room while he showered, after spending two nights sleeping next to him. Now, the padd is gone, somewhere across campus with him and his personal one and his dinner and she’s come back again, rooted to nearly the same place but a different night and a different time.

She reaches out and picks up the framed holo of Vulcan that he has on his desk, turning it this way and that so it catches the light. It’s beautiful, really, the landscape depicted in it far more austere than any place she’s ever been, but pretty in a harsh, wild sort of way.

She replaces it, trying to put it back in the same spot she picked it up from, then turns towards his ka’athyra. There’s nothing and no one to keep her from touching it this time, so she plucks a string and listens to the clear note, the way it pierces the air around her.

When it fades, she looks at his couch, over towards his kitchen, his desk again, thinking that it’s always this still and quiet when he’s here, none of the barely controlled chaos of the dorms and certainly nothing approximating living with an Orion, just the understated art on his walls and his shelves full of books. There’s a certain type of peace in the way he’s decorated the space and arranged his belongings that is sorely lacking from where she lives.

It’s also lonely. Everything is hushed and nobody’s shouting in the halls, her dormmates aren’t laughing in the common room loud enough that everyone can hear them, and there isn’t music blasting through a half open door, just the faint sounds of the city and what might be a dog that barks once on the sidewalk outside, then falls silent.

She could turn on a holovid and watch it on her padd, but that thought only reminds her of Spock’s slides and she firmly pushes away the fact that she still has to send them to him. She’ll do it in the morning, if it’s really that simple.

Where, exactly, is another matter. Her own room, which she’ll go back to at some point tonight. Except that looking around his living room, her dorm feels far away, much farther than the short walk through campus. The thought of it seems loud and jarring with bright white lights and red bedspreads, none of the golden lamps that Spock seems to prefer, or the subdued grays and earth tones of his furniture and art, and the rich, deep brown and rust colored yarn of the blanket draped over his couch.

It’s soft under her fingers. Thick and smooth and it feels like wool, so that she’s staring at it and thinking of his mother, of Spock having a Terran knitted blanket among his few possessions in the room before she realizes what she’s doing and pulls her hand back.

She tries and fails to keep herself from remembering meeting his mother, the mess that was that whole weekend at Pike’s, and then the fact that she and Spock slept together, and then his parents showing up, and moreover how long ago that seems, ages and ages ago. It was, really. It might have been towards the end of the summer, but the semester started weeks ago now and she’s facing midterms soon, so that those last few days of summer are far behind her, separated by not just time but the distance of everything between them.

And yet here she is, standing in his living room once again, except that what’s she’s doing there and how she ended up there is less of a mystery this time, not something she just fell into. She could have gone back to her dorm, or to the library, or the mess hall which is open all night. She had the option to go to the Xenolinguistics building, or even the gym, and she hadn’t. She had walked across campus, down the path that leads to the faculty quarters, and into his apartment building, waiting for the turbo lift to take her to his floor with all the ease and familiarity of having been there before. 

She looks around herself, since maybe this isn’t right, maybe she should get going, slip her boots back on and pick up her bag and let the door close behind her, except that instead, she sits down on his couch. It’s just as comfortable as it was all those weeks ago and she holds her glass of water between her knees for a moment, then reaches forward and puts it on the coffee table, and then picks it up again and slides a coaster under it.

Her hands feel empty without it and so she smooths them over her thighs, then picks at the blanket again, rubbing it between her fingers. She’s tired enough that she could sleep, except that he didn’t really invite her to stay the night. Or he did. Maybe. It might have been implicit in his offer or it might have been a trick of language and chosen words, his actual intention lost in the space between them when he spoke so that she’s left unsure as to what he really meant.

Unclear, she can imagine telling him with that same bland inflection he uses sometimes. She could let him know that his offer lacked sufficient specificity and that she remains uncertain as to the parameters of his suggestion, but that would only cause him to explain and the uncertainty of how long he really intends for her to be welcome there is preferable to having to hear him say that he meant an hour or two, not the entire night.

Not that she would stay that long anyway. She doesn’t need to, just needs a moment of this, the softness of the blanket against her hand and the warmth of his apartment easing a deep chill in her, and a chance to be undisturbed for long enough to gather her thoughts, and until she does she’ll just keep sitting there, her fingers buried in the smooth wool.

The chime of her comm pierces her thoughts and she jerks slightly as she turns to look at her bag where she left it next to the door.

She listens to it ring and ring and it’s not until its fallen silent that she lets go of the blanket and gathers herself to stand, crossing the room slowly, unsure of who might be calling and even more uncertain that she wants to talk to anyone right then.

She blinks at the ID, then hits the button to return the call.

“I had thought to inform you earlier and was remiss in not doing so that a secondary duotronic transference transducer does not exist,” Spock says when he answers after the first ring.

“What?” she asks squinting down at her comm.

“I apologize for disturbing you.”

“No, it’s-“ She stares around his apartment, then back at his comm, his voice resonating through the room, clearer and sharper than it was when he was gone on the ship. “It’s fine.”

“Cadet Kirk was mistaken in asking you to reroute the ship’s communications systems through such means. There is a duotronic transducer that controls the encryption of the long range sensors, but it cannot be linked to other systems in the way in which he presumed that it could be, and furthermore it is not a transference transducer.”

“Oh,” she says, feeling something that she didn’t know was tight ease inside her stomach. “Is there- was there something else that I should have done instead?”

“No.”

“Ok,” she says, unsure if the idea of being stranded with no communication system is worse than there having been a solution but her not knowing what it was.

“I will let you return to your work,” he says and she can imagine the way he would fold his comm closed, those long fingers of his snapping the plastic casing shut.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” she tells him, glancing over at his couch. “But you’re busy. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll, uh, I’ll talk to you later.”

“My human colleagues have adjourned in order to procure caffeine,” he says instead of hanging up.

“Didn’t you just get started?”

“Yes.”

She imagines that swift look of exasperation he gets sometimes, and which would certainly cross his face at the thought of delaying work in order to get coffee. Illogical, she’s sure, to pause in a task and therefore take even more time to complete it.

“Long night, then,” she says.

“I presume as much,” he says and she wonders what that means for her, if she’s supposed to be gone when he gets back, if she’s supposed to be there still. 

“Do you know- do you have an idea of when you’ll be done?”

“I do not.”

She imagines him there with all of his coworkers in some bland conference room that looks rather sinister in her mind as they talk about all of the students in turn, one by one.

But while the other officers took a break, Spock called her so that she wouldn’t spend all night thinking about that transducer, not that the thought was on her mind what with how far away the test seems now that she’s standing in his quarters, the soft light and silence a far cry from the jarring, shrill noises of the klaxons and Kirk’s voice raised above the din.

“Is it ok if I take a shower?” she asks, thinking about the way her shirt stuck to her with sweat and how she had wanted to shower in her own room, probably kicking Gaila’s clothes aside to do so since she always leaves them bunched up on the floor of their bathroom.

There’s a hesitation before he says, “Of course.”

“If it’s not, I can-“

“I was uncertain as to-“ he starts, talking over her before stopping himself, so that static crackles in the silence between their comms. “I apologize for interrupting you.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she says, winding her ponytail around her hand, then releasing it again. She shouldn’t shower anyway. She doesn’t have a change of clothes and it’s maybe not right to make herself so comfortable, since a glass of water was one thing but using his soap and towels seems different entirely.

“I did not realize that you had taken the opportunity to go to my quarters,” he says and she stares down at her comm as he says it, wondering what he thought she had done instead. Maybe just that she had kept sitting there, in need of a second tissue, unmoving and alone in the lobby of the sim building.

She’s alone now too, but it’s different here.

“Unless that is not what you have done and you are simply seeking my opinion,” he says and she breathes out something that might be a laugh.

“Funny,” she says, and hears in the word the echo of the warm weeks of summer.

“It was not intended to be so.”

“Sure.”

“My replicator is not currently programmed for any Terran food,” he says and she glances over at it, a lone indicator light blinking, showing that it’s on standby.

“It’s fine, that’s not…” She shakes her head even though he can’t see it, unsure of how he guessed that she hasn’t eaten. “I probably shouldn’t be drowning myself in ice cream anyway.”

“Would that have been your preference?”

“No,” she says, then corrects herself. “Yes. You should really consider serving sundaes in the hall outside the simulator room. Might go pretty far towards ensuring the recovery period from your damn test is as short as possible.”

“I will take that into consideration,” he says.

She wants to say more, to keep talking to him except that she can hear voices in the background and imagines his coworkers filing back in with their cups of coffee. She wonders who’s there. Rand, definitely. Others that she doesn’t know, sitting around with Spock as they come up with detailed analyses of how she and her classmates did. She wonders when, exactly, they’ll get to her, or if they already did. It makes her itchy, uncomfortable to think about, the memory of officers standing behind the windows above her too fresh in her mind. 

It’s better, really, that Spock’s there. Makes something about the whole thing easier to swallow.

“Well have fun grading. Especially Kirk’s. Give him hell for me.”

“I will take that under advisement as well,” he says and then there’s a pause before he adds, “Good night.”

She folds her own comm closed after he hangs up, holding onto it for a moment before slipping it back into her bag.

She spends too long looking at the laundry ‘fresher in his bedroom. She could clean her uniform in the sonics in his shower, except that he has a water setting that is what she really wants to use, or she could pull dirty clothes on again after her shower since it won’t be the first time that she’s dressed in his bedroom in clothes she had already worn, or she could just go to her dorm where she has drawers full of clean underwear, crisp uniforms waiting for the morning, or she could just not shower at all and continue standing there, staring at the unit, unable to bring herself to make a decision because it’s just too great an effort to do much of anything, the inertia of remaining still alluring in its simplicity.

The thought of a hot shower eventually wins and she steps out of her clothes, tossing them in his ‘fresher and turning it on, trying to not think too hard about what it was like to pick her scattered uniform off the floor all those weeks ago and step into it while he packed.

The moment the water hits her, she lets out a long breath, closing her eyes and letting the spray course over her, loosening muscles she didn’t realize were that tense. She turns it up hotter, and then hotter still so that her skin pricks, until the steam is dense enough that she can barely see his soap. The familiar scent of it rises through the mist until she has to close her eyes, lean back against the wet tile and just breathe for a long time, listening to the pounding of the water until the steam eases the tightness in her throat.

Afterwards, she wraps herself in one of his towels, glad for the warmth of his apartment as she tucks it under her arms and flexes her toes against the tile floor, staring at herself in his mirror for a moment as she thinks about the last time she was there, flushed and sweaty after getting out of his bed.

This time, she isn’t watching him gather his things and this time he isn’t smoothing out the rumpled bedspread and this time, they aren’t about to leave, to walk out of his apartment and let the door slide shut behind them. 

She runs her fingers over the edge of the sink where he lifted her onto it so long ago, then tucks her still damp hair behind her ears and walks back into his bedroom. The cycle is done on his ‘fresher and she pulls her panties out before resetting it to get the creases out of the rest of her clothes, thinking that half of her friends would be lining up behind her to have access to a unit like this, instead of all of them having to take turns with the ancient ones in the basement of their dorms that take forever and are broken half of the time, making Gaila in high demand to come fix them at all hours of the day and night.

The thought makes Nyota wonder if Kirk is gone yet, if she should wait for her clothes to be done and head back to her room. She could. Should, maybe. But she doesn’t, and instead hangs his towel up as neatly as she can and starts shifting through his drawers until she finds a stack of clean, soft t-shirts, one from the Lexington and one from the science department and one that must have been given to his graduating class since it has his year stamped across the front, and a handful of plain gray ones with a Starfleet crest on the left chest. She pulls out the one from the Academy, tracing ‘2254’ across the front of it before pulling it on and tugging her hair out from under the collar.

She examines his replicator for a long time, trying and failing to translate the names of the Vulcan dishes. It’s too unfamiliar to her, an entire aspect of his language that she’s only been exposed to that one time they had dinner at that restaurant and again when his parents were here, so that while she can read any of the Vulcan texts he has on his bookshelf, she can’t figure out what might be good to eat. Briefly, she debates choosing at random, then remembers the gummy, dry chalk-like taste of his dinner that she tried and opens his refrigerator instead.

She pulls out the lone container, opens it and examines the broth and vegetables carefully before pulling a spoon out and dipping it in so that she can try a tiny bit. It’s good, she decides. Different than anything else she’s eaten with him, but not bad. She tries a lump of what might be either squash or something else entirely and then another of what might be a potato, and then fishes something vibrantly blue out of the bottom and inspects it before biting it in half. It’s delicious. Spicy, almost, hot like a radish is. She swallows the other half and searches for another one, before thinking that she should stop since eating his leftovers wasn’t exactly clearly spelled out in his offer, except that while she tries to make herself close the container and replace it in his fridge, she takes another bite and then another, and then it’s nearly gone and she just finishes it, standing there barefoot in his kitchen, wearing his shirt and trying to not think too hard about anything beyond the scrape of her spoon and whether or not she should have bothered to heat the soup up before eating it.

Afterwards, when she’s washed the dishes and has replaced them as carefully as she can in his cupboard where he keeps his containers and the spoon back in his drawer, nestled with the other ones, and has checked to see if her clothes are finished only to find that they aren’t, she stares around herself in his bedroom, listening to the quiet and trying to will herself to move towards her school bag.

His slides, she reminds herself. She knows where he keeps his data chips in his office and they’re likely in the same exact place in his desk here and she could leave his slides for him now, if she can figure out how to access them on her padd. Either that, or she could study for her test, the very thought of it making her take a step towards the door to his bedroom, her bare feet silent against his floor except that the idea of her work threatens to pierce the calm of his apartment, to throw her mind back into the dizzying spin of the semester that seems too out of place with the quiet and peaceful silence. 

She yawns into her shoulder, the fabric of his shirt soft against her cheek. She should wait for her clothes and go home. She should make herself get out her work, but she’s too warm and relaxed from her shower and her stomach is full for the first time since breakfast. She should not sit down on the edge of his bed, and certainly shouldn’t lie down on top of the covers and push at the pillow until it’s comfortable. 

It’s just for a moment she tells herself, staring at the light on his ‘fresher. 

Later, when the chime alerting her that her clothes are done wakes her, she blinks over at it before turning the other way and curling in on herself, staring at his side of the bed, empty and still neatly made until she falls asleep again.


	29. Chapter 29

She’s sure that there’s something that’s the right thing to say when she’s been watching her former professor turned research advisor turned fake boyfriend turned boss sleep next to her and especially now that his eyes are fluttering open, but Nyota doesn’t know what it is, so she just thumbs off her padd, plunging his bedroom into darkness, and tells him, “I’m sorry but I ate all your food.”

“All of it?” he asks, his eyes closing again as he pushes his face into the pillow.  The streetlights shining through his windows are not enough to completely penetrate the dimness of his bedroom, but she can see well enough, the scant light outlining him in grays and blacks instead of the blue glow of her padd.  Something in her chest is aching, watching him so sleepy like that, half awake with his hair messy and his t-shirt rumpled, no matter that the last time she saw him he was on his way to grade that damn test.

“Your soup,” she clarifies, tucking her padd into her lap and crossing her hands over it, pushing it down against the bedspread and sheet that she has spread across her legs.

“It is no matter,” he says, his voice slightly rough and his eyes still closed and she wonders if he’s too tired to articulate ‘consequence’.

He looks tired.  She wonders what time it is and how long he’s been asleep.  Not long enough by the way he’s blinking up at her with those impossibly long eyelashes and something soft around the corner of his eyes and mouth that isn’t there during the day.

It certainly isn’t daytime now, no first break of dawn visible outside his window, which she had checked for after being unable to find a single clock in his apartment when she had woken some time ago, thirsty and hot from being under the blankets, unsure of how exactly they had come to cover her.  She had pushed them back carefully, not wanting to wake him, and had padded into his living room for her glass of water, only to find it missing. Instead, she had found it perched on the nightstand when she had returned to his bedroom, set next to where she had been sleeping and in easy reach, though she had missed it in the darkness when she had first woken.

It’s sitting there still, half empty now from the long drink she had taken as she stared down at him, uncertain as to whether to rejoin him or to dress and slip out into the night.

“Spock?” she whispers, pushing her padd deeper into her lap.

“Yes?”

She lets her fingers tighten over the edge of her padd and looks down at it as she says, “I’m sorry I said all of that earlier.”

His eyes catch the glow of the streetlight outside of his window and she thinks for a moment that he’s going to ask her to clarify, but he doesn’t, his cheek still pressed to his pillow and his eyes closing again, briefly, before he looks up at her.  “You have said as much.”

“I was upset,” she says, whispers it into the dark of his bedroom, unsure that she really wants to voice that, unsure in general of sitting there next to him, being there like this with the heavy quiet between them in the wake of the day that just happened, something still empty and hollow inside of her chest.  “And I’m really sorry.”

“Emotional turmoil is a common occurrence after the examination.”

“That doesn’t mean I should take it out on you.”

She smooths his bedspread over her thighs, crossing her legs under it and feels the blankets pull and shift as he sits up a bit, pushing himself half upright.

“I believe you simply have the advantage of actually knowing the programmer.  Many other cadets would be resoundingly jealous of your opportunity to inform me as to their true opinion of the simulation.”

“You’re afraid of getting accosted by angry cadets?” she asks, thinking of what Kirk might have said to him in the moments after the sim ended.

“Perhaps,” he says, looking out across the room instead of at her, like he was.

She has no idea what time it is or how much he normally sleeps since she’s pretty sure that Vulcans can go days without needing to rest, but when she looks at him, he seems tired, not only like he just woke up but slightly exhausted in the way he’s holding himself, something that she never thought she would see from him, that very near slump against the pillows.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she tells him and he shakes his head once, gently.

“Do not trouble yourself.”  His eyes trace over her and under his scrutiny she flattens out his bedspread again, running her hands over it until it’s neat and even across her legs.  “You are awake as well.”

She shrugs, dipping her head forward, her hair sliding into her face.

“I was thinking about that test,” she admits, since that’s easier to get out than any acknowledgement that she had been watching him as he slept on his side, curled into the blankets, the way his lips were slightly parted and his chest rose and fell evenly, slowly.

She looks away, out into the dark shadows of his bedroom so that she doesn’t end up staring at him again, the blankets pooled around his narrow waist or the way the shirt he’s wearing hugs his chest.  It’s one of the gray ones she had found in his drawer and she thinks about how soft the fabric was between her fingers.  It’s warm now, probably, from his body heat.

“I did not think you would come here tonight,” he says quietly, jarring her from her thoughts as they begin to slide back towards the sim, the image of him sleeping.

She runs her hand over his quilt again, rubbing her fingers against it as she remembers the complete silence after he had left, the napkin he had given her still fisted in her hand and damp, her neck tingling from the weight of his touch.  They’re not touching now, a careful distance between them, no matter how she can feel the way the mattress dips towards him, or how with each of his movements the blankets tug and shift.

“My clothes weren’t done,” she says, waving towards his ‘fresher like that’s possibly a sufficient reply to what he said, but she can’t find anything else to say, neither an admission that she too didn’t think she’d walk over here or an acknowledgement of his offer that has led to her being there in his bed, her eyes gummy with sleep and the hush between them in the dim light, their voices low in the darkness.

She watches the way his eyes track her gesture, his attention on her hand and then back on her face so that she stares back at him, just watches him as he looks at her.

She’s still staring at him when his eyes drop to her lap and she presses her hands to her padd, spreads her palms over it, sure that she can feel the backs of her hands prick under the weight of his gaze.

“You reviewed your assessment,” he says and he probably doesn’t need her to nod since what he said doesn’t sound like a question, not after all this time, how well he’s come to know her that that’s exactly what she was doing, had woken up in the middle of the night and had been unable to not open it and read what was written, but she does anyway, pressing her lips together and rubbing her thumb over the edge of her padd.

“I did.”

He sits up further, arranging the blankets neatly over his lap as he does so, so that they’re perfectly folded, nearly creased with his precision.

“Are you-“ he starts, his hand passing over the sheets one more time.  “Are you well?”

“Not, uh…”  She runs her hand back through her hair, gripping a handful of it at the base of her neck as she stares down at her padd.  “Not the best comments I’ve ever received.”

She lets her hand tighten, then makes herself release her fingers, carding her hair forward over her shoulder so that even if she were to raise her gaze from her blank, dark padd she couldn’t see him next to her.  “The worst, actually.  By a lot.  I didn’t… I wasn’t sure if…”

She has to stop and work her tongue into her cheek, focusing on stopping the tremble that threatens at the corner of her mouth.

“You were not certain of what, precisely?” he asks when she doesn’t continue, just sits there staring into the dark, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.

“Just that it was so bad and-“ She draws in a breath, tries to will it to not shake, but it does anyway.  “What to- What I’m going to do?  About it?  Cause it’s not-“  Salvageable.  Manageable.  Practical or realistic to try to wrestle marks so bad, so utterly hopeless into something more acceptable, not when the scores from today - yesterday, she thinks, probably yesterday by now - so thoroughly dragged down the rest of her average.

“I do not understand,” he says and she shakes her head, feeling some of her hair slip from over her shoulder to hang down her back again.

She raises her hand to scrub at her eyes with her thumb and forefinger, squinting against the pressure.  “How do I - what am I supposed to do?” she asks, tapping her other hand against the padd, her nails rhythmic and fast against it.  “You know what it- what they, you - what it has for comments.  And I-“

He waits while she gathers herself, silent and unmoving next to her.  She’s sure that if she dropped her hand she would find him watching her, but she doesn’t, just keeps pushing at her eyes and forcing her breath to be calm and even, like how his was when he was sleeping.

“I want to know what happens now,” she finally gets out, pressing the words out carefully so that they’re measured and steady, so that her voice doesn’t shake on them.  “What to do about doing better than this.  To practice, or…”

She lets herself trail off, unsure of what exactly she’s asking and it’s hard to breathe again, the overly warm air of his apartment drying out her mouth every time she tries.

“To study?” he finally prompts when she doesn’t continue.  “To better prepare yourself?”

“Yes.”

“The simulations themselves are intended to develop your skills.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head quickly.  “How can I make sure that I do better?  Next time, later this year and next year.”

“By undergoing additional simulations you will-“

“-No,” she says again.  “Before I take any more.”

He pauses for a second, then says, “There is no training available for training simulations.”

“But what am I-“  She picks at the sheet, plucking at it between her thumb and first two fingers, rubbing the fabric back and forth as she shakes her head again, unable to draw words out of herself, not past the tightness that’s sitting in her chest.  She just looks at him, everything in her feeling leaden and aching and jumpy all at once, so that all she can do is continue shaking her head at him, her lips pressed tightly together, powerless to explain.

“When you take the Kobayashi Maru again-“

“-Again?”  She drops her hand to stare at him, blinking against the darkness of his bedroom like that will bring him into sharper focus, will push away the shadows falling across him and help her better hear what he just said.  “God, Spock, no.”

“You performed well enough that I anticipate many command track cadets will ask you to serve on their bridge crew.”

“No,” she says again, louder, speaks the word into the quiet of his bedroom so that it cuts through the darkness.

“Nyota-“

“-Did you read this?” she asks, tapping at her padd again and his eyes shift to her hand, then up to her and there’s a long moment, a pause that hangs in the air before he nods.

“You are aware that I did.”

He didn’t write her assessment, she doesn’t think. Nowhere in the list of comments of things she did wrong, things she should have known to do better, actions she could have taken and didn’t were signs of how he uses words, the particular way he strings them together.  But he was there, sitting next to or near whoever did type it up and she tightens her fingers on her padd, pushes it farther into her lap like she can tuck it away beneath the blankets.

“Nyota,” he says slowly, carefully, her name drawn out with none of his customary efficiency in his voice.  “It is perhaps not necessarily apparent to you, but I can assure you that you did well.”

“I didn’t.”

“It is a difficult test.  You performed exemplary for a third year student who has not had ample experience with simulations.”

“Difficult?  It was terrible, Spock, it was-“  She can’t find a word.  Awful.  Horrible in a way that she hadn’t known was coming.  Unexpected and surprising, both in how quickly everything had fallen apart around them and how poorly they had done on it.

Not even poorly, she thinks as she drags her legs up under the covers so that she can wrap her arms around them, her padd pressing into her stomach uncomfortably, digging into her ribs.  So abysmal that they hadn’t passed a single part of it.

She hears the sheets whisper again and feels the bed shift as he adjusts himself.

“Nyota,” he says and she shakes her head hard, the vacant, cavernous feeling in her quickly filling with heat, with a sickening pounding twist. She holds herself tighter, her hands aching with the tenseness of her fingers wrapped around her own wrists as she tries to push away the the small itch of hurt left lingering in her chest left over from the afternoon and evening, the quiet burn that races and jumps inside of her.

She thinks he bends forward to catch her eye, but she doesn’t turn to check.

“I have no fondness for watching cadets undergo that experience,” he says so quietly, so softly that if she weren’t right next to him she wouldn’t hear him, the words would be lost to a greater distance than is between them now.

She raises one hand to wipe the heel of her palm across her cheekbone, bends to press her face to the top of her knees, spots of dampness left on his quilt when she straightens again.

“I didn’t do well,” she says softly, unable to raise her voice to say it louder so that it comes out half choked, the words cut off and hushed. 

“You did.”

“No, I didn’t. I tried, but I-”

“-Only accepting perfection will inexorably lead to continued disappointment and leave you unable to recognize your improvement over time.”

“But-“

“Nyota, you performed admirably.  If you cannot appreciate that, it will not dissuade me from doing so in your stead.”

That ache is still there, still pushing at her and she swallows, the motion catching in her throat.

“The grade-“

“-The assessment is designed to simulate situations you will certainly face as an officer.  Loss of life, egregious injury, and complete failure to carry out mission parameters are all too common once you earn your commission, and occur more regularly than anyone wishes to acknowledge.”

She stares at him, then looks away towards his dresser, the insignia he leaves there glinting through the darkness.

“Stop interrupting me,” she mutters, scrubbing her hands over her face again, her head threatening to begin to pound.  “Talk about failure to improve.”

“I apologize,” he says and she feels him reach across the space between them, his fingers a light brush down her arm before their gone again, the trace of the warmth of his touch still lingering.

He lets her sit there for a long time, long enough that her shoulders begin to hurt with the way she’s sitting, wrapped up in herself, and long enough that the dampness on the fabric over her knees is gone before he speaks again, his voice so gentle that it makes her throat ache.

“You are an excellent academic, a skill that is essential to a communications officer in the fleet and to carrying out the exploration and scientific research at the heart of Starfleet’s mission, and in these types of practical situations, you will also excel.  I find it unlikely that your talents and aptitude will not extend themselves to these simulations, given time to develop such skills.”

“What if I don’t?” she asks, hating how her voice breaks over the words, hating the crack and the tremble and how hard it is to draw in air afterwards, how it both rushes into her lungs and catches all at once, leaving her breathless and aching, down deep inside where the warmth of his quarters, the comfort of his bed and blankets and pillows don’t reach.

“Nyota, that is improbable to a degree to which it should not trouble you.  It is illogical to worry that you will not improve in this field when you have done so in so many others,” he says softly.

“But the only way to do so is to keep taking them,” she says, hearing the hollowness in her own words.

She thinks he might touch her again, or is imagining it, the feeling of his fingers on her skin etched in her mind now.

“Yes.”

“If I ask again will the answer be different?” she asks, tugging her knees in a little tighter as she looks over at him.

“If it is any consolation, every cadet is in the same position.”

She thinks of McCoy and the pressure he puts on himself to learn about each new species as they come through the hospital, the hours he spends bent over textbooks, his desk ringed with the marks of mugs of coffee and a half finished plate of food next to him, and Sulu who she only just met but who has that same intensity about him, that drive that she sees in everyone at the Academy, the push to be the best and the mad scramble to do so with how difficult that is.

“Even Kirk?” she asks, knowing how hard he, more than nearly anyone she’s met, exerts himself.  And, somehow, seems to have the strain and pressure of the Academy bring out the best in him.

“He was responsible for you and your crewmates during the simulation, so it would not be inappropriate to suppose that he, in fact, is judged perhaps more harshly.”

“Huh.  That makes me feel a little bit better,” she says, glancing over at Spock again, wondering if he can hear the joke in her voice.  He can, she thinks, and he doesn’t ask for an explanation like he used to.

“It is illogical to take pleasure in another’s misfortune.”

“Shadenfreude is an ancient human custom,” she says.  “And as someone once told me, cultural traditions are not illogical.”

She feels him looking at her and when she rests her cheek on her knees so that she can look back, his brows are drawn together, his eyes tracing over her.

“You remember that,” he says and she presses her cheek down to her knees, nods.

“Stating the obvious is, however, illogical,” she says.  “See how much I’ve learned?”

“As I said, you typically excel at that which you apply yourself.”

She nods, hearing his words and trying to internalize them, trying to make them true in the place down deep inside of herself that still aches, still feels numb and raw.

She drops her forehead onto her knees and tightens her arms around her legs, pulling them further into herself, the edge of the padd digging into the bottom of her ribs in a way that hurts.  She sits like that for a moment staring down at her own lap, the padd, the blankets bunched over her hips and the rumpled cloth of the shirt she pulled on before she looks at it closer, at his graduation year printed on the front, and then sits up just enough to raise her head and peer at him.  “You were a cadet.”

She nods down at her shirt as if for proof and when she looks up again he’s followed her gaze, which makes her suddenly, viscerally aware of the fact that she didn’t put her bra back on.

“So you took it, then,” she says, readjusting her grip on her wrists.  “The Kobayashi Maru.”

He’s quiet for a moment and she curls her toes into his bed as she watches him, that spot between his brows creasing before his expression smooths out again.

“I did.  And over the course of my time at the Academy, I can tell you that many of my reviews centered on a perceived lack of inclination to bond with my classmates.”

“Perceived?” she asks, and one of his eyebrows twitches, the closest she thinks he’ll come to rolling his eyes, like the very human gesture is trapped in there somewhere, subsumed under everything he won’t allow himself and she watches it with some detachment, sure enough of him to know what she’s seeing but still feeling too hollow and empty to echo anything in his expression.  

“It is conceivable that such assessments had a certain amount of truth.”

“Conceivable,” she repeats slowly.  “Probable, perhaps?”

“It has been some time since I reviewed my Academy evaluations, I would not want to rush to either confirm nor deny such an assertion without doing so.”

“You have a perfect memory,” she reminds him.

“Which is what my instructors informed me of when I failed to show sufficient, timely improvement.”

She passes her tongue over her lips, sure that he knows that he didn’t answer what she was really asking.

“How was it when you first took it?” she asks, watching him take a breath and let it out again, aware that this might be beyond the bounds of what he’ll share, not if he didn’t offer the information up.

“Unpleasant,” he says after a long moment and she thinks of him sorting through different descriptors, different choices of what word he might use.

“Is that an understatement?” she asks him.

“Indeed.”  His head tips to the side and she watches him get that slight distance in his eyes as he thinks, before he seems to come to some decision as he turns to her.  “It was perhaps ill-advised that I took it, and I nearly did not as it was not a graduation requirement as it is now.”

“Didn’t go well?” she asks, something less than a guess since she’s certain she can hear everything behind his words.

“It was not as I had expected.”  He nods towards her, then looks up at her, his eyes searching over her face.  “As you perhaps may understand.”

“Perhaps,” she echoes, adjusting her grip on her wrists.

He’s quiet again and she thinks that the subject has been dropped, that the silence in his room is thick enough to blanket the conversation, when he says, “It would not be incorrect to conclude that the test was unremarkable as I did not find much of the Academy an enjoyable experience, and so too was that simulation.”

“I thought you liked your career,” she says, unsure of how he couldn’t, not with how it’s turned out for him, the opportunities he’s gotten and the accomplishments he’s achieved in such a short time.

“Lately it has been much improved,” he says and looks up, right at her, his eyes dark and soft and so brown, even in the dim light

She stares over at him, her cheek pressed to the top of her knees, feeling something deep in her chest, something fluttery and quick, something that makes her restless and want to shift and adjust herself, except that his bedroom is dark and quiet, so she only slides her foot over far enough to nudge his leg.

“I’m sorry you didn’t like it here,” she says, finds the words somewhere under the sudden racing of her thoughts.  They still, instantly, in the moment her toes touch him, aware that she touched skin, aware that it means that he’s wearing shorts, then, or boxers.  Not those pants he has.  It makes her very conscious of her own bare legs, her arms around them over the bedspread, and the sheet brushing against her skin, how close to each other they are, even with those inches between them.

“As I am certain you have concluded, the Academy is not intended to be pleasant,” he says, his voice cutting into her thoughts.

“Still,” she says and finds herself nudging him again, the jumble of her thoughts resolving into the fact that she dislikes the thought that he spent four years here unhappy.  Enduring an unpleasant experience, whatever he wants to call it.  

His hand falls to the top of her foot, squeezing it through the blankets, the warmth radiating through the fabric to her skin.  She looks down at his fingers, the way they’re curled over the suggestion of her foot under his bedspread and sheet.  

“Is that why you spent the whole time playing the piano?” she asks and looks up in time to see his eyebrow quirk, just slightly, just barely there but she still catches the motion.

“That is an exaggeration.”

“Most of your time?”

“Not most.”

“A significant proportion?”

“Define significant.”

“Five eighths.  Twenty seven sixty fifths.”

“Inaccurate, both.”

“Well I guess you had to leave some time for traveling the globe and getting speeding tickets while you were at it.”

“I believe I have already made clear that incident did not occur while I was at the Academy.”

“Hmm, but it did occur.”

“I have not said as much.”

“You don’t have to,” she says, flexing her toes under his hand.

His thumb runs back and forth, slow and steady and even through the layers of fabric she imagines that she can feel the warmth of his hand against her foot, sure that it’s seeping through to her skin.

“You will do well, Nyota,” he says softly and she lets out a breath, not wanting to talk about it but wanting to hear his words, more than she thought she did now that he’s said them. Listening to him say that helps to ease a tightness in her chest that feels old and well worn, formed a long time ago and which runs deep in her.

“I don’t know,” she says, shifting slightly, releasing her wrists to spread her hands on her shins, but not moving her foot away from his touch.  “Maybe.”

“You are a third year cadet with a publishable paper, top marks in your classes, and have an advantage over your classmates of having already completed an advanced training simulation.”

She winces, all too aware of the padd that’s pressing into her stomach, and even more aware of how little she wants to tell him the words sitting at the back of her throat and how certain that she’s going to voice them anyway.  “I haven’t submitted it.”

“Pardon?”

“My paper.  I haven’t sent it anywhere.”

“You have not?”

“That’s what I said.”

There’s a pause and she knows he’s looking at her, doesn’t have to turn to check.

“I see,” he finally says and then immediately asks, “Why?”

She bends forward, running her hands back through her hair, over and over again, combing it back from her face, twisting it around her hand before letting it fall loose again as she shrugs.

“Because?” he asks and a laugh escapes her, a soft huff of air that startles her with how it rises out of her.

“I guess.”

“That is illogical.”

“I know.”  She ducks her head slightly, feeling her hair slide forward around her shoulders.

“Are you intending to submit it?”

“Yes,” she says, wrapping her arms around her legs again, even though sitting like that is making her back and shoulders ache.  

“May I ask when?”

“Any second now,” she says, mutters it into her knees, wondering how long it’s going to take him to point out that the submission deadlines are fast approaching.

He doesn’t, though, and she keeps sitting there, folded in on herself, the padd jutting into her ribs, staring across his bedroom and willing the topic to slide away, for him to drop it so that she doesn’t have to acknowledge that jump that’s lodged in her stomach, the way it twists around whenever she thinks about her paper.

“You are not prone to procrastination,” he finally says and she doesn’t answer, just tightens her hold on her legs.  “Have you decided that it requires further revisions?”

She shakes her head instead of answering and in the silence she hears the blankets rustle, feels the bed shift slightly.  

“Would you like to again discuss where to send it?  We did not have the opportunity to finish our previous conversation.”

“No, I’ll do it.”  She leans forward enough to press her forehead to her knees, so that her back stretches in a way that is nearly too much.  She forces her shoulders into a shrug.  “I just need to decide on a journal and send it in.  I can get it done tomorrow.”

Or the next day.  Or over the weekend, except that she’s pretty sure that it needs to be done by next week, not that she’s checked the deadline recently and she might be remembering the date wrong.  Maybe it’s already passed so that she doesn’t have to turn it in at all, doesn’t have to send it out into the ether and wait days or weeks or months for a response, however long it takes the editors to decide if what she wrote was good enough.

“It is on your padd?” he asks and she shakes her head at the one in her lap.

“My other one.”

She looks up when she feels the mattress move, when a rush of cooler air hits her from Spock lifting the blankets and slipping out from in between them.

Boxers, she sees, as she readjusts the sheets around herself.

“What is your preference for a journal?” he asks when he brings her padd back, a data chip held in his other hand.

“You went through my stuff,” she says instead of answering as he folds the blankets back again and gets beneath them.

“As you yourself so recently said, it is illogical to state the obvious.”

“Doesn’t that then become illogical to say?”

“You routinely place your padd in your bag last.  It was on top,” he says and she thinks about pointing out that he didn’t answer her, but he’s flicking on her padd and it’s too distracting to see him holding it.  She peers over at it, moving as much as she can without letting go of her grip on her legs, staring at how odd it is to see her personal padd in his hands, the one that she uses constantly, a dozen times or more a day and carries with her nearly everywhere she goes, now braced in his palm with his long fingers spread over the back.  

He looks over her, then down at her shirt again.  “Furthermore, I do not believe that you are in a position to object to procuring other’s possessions.”

She finds his leg again with her foot, pushes at it, his skin warm against hers.  She thinks he’s going to shift away but he doesn’t, just glances down at the lump of her foot under his blankets and then back at her padd, the data chip still held in his fingers.

“Would you like me to retrieve the slides now?” he offers and she pulls her foot back slightly, nods.

She can’t quite get over him holding her padd, when not even Gaila touches it.  It looks small in his hands and she can tell the way she has it set up is unfamiliar to him because his movements look slightly uncoordinated, like he has to search around for how to do something that comes so easily to him on his own padd.

“Here,” he says, and she follows where he’s pointing in some settings menu she’s never accessed.

“How do you know all of this?” she asks, then doesn’t wait for an answer, leaning over slightly, towards him, to look at the list of files he’s pulled up.

“That’s all of them?” she asks but doesn’t need to because she can see that there they are, along with dozens of other files she’s written or used or accessed in the last few weeks.  “How far back does this go?”

“Do you not routinely reconfigure your padd to better manage the storage and improve its processing speed?”

“I routinely ignore Gaila when she tells me to do something that sounds very similar.”

“Then this would then contain the entirety of the files you have worked with.”

“Huh,” she says, leaning into him slightly, shifting a bit closer so that she can see better, not quite brushing against him but close enough that she can feel the heat of his body next to hers, the near suggestion of touch.

“That’s them,” she says, pointing at a group of files from back in the beginning of the term, but he’s already seen them, has already scrolled that far up and is opening them and flicking through them, there among everything else she was working on when the semester started.

Along with every single one of the messages she started to write him while he was gone and never ended up sending.

“No, don’t,“ she says and reaches out to grab the padd from him, but he’s such a fast reader that she’s all too certain that he’s read them before she even realized they were on the screen, can tell he did by the way he lets the padd slip from his hands and the way his eyes darted over to her, too quick and too focused for him to not be trying to suss out the meaning behind her abbreviated, abruptly halted letters to him.  “Don’t look at those.”

“My apologies.”

“No, it’s fine, just-“  She folds it against her chest, hugs it to herself, the padd clicking against the one she’s already holding, both of them crammed together in the space between her body and her legs.  “Sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

“It’s a little-“  She tries to get out a smile, a small laugh, but can’t. 

“It is what?” he asks when she doesn’t uncurl herself, doesn’t hand the padd back and doesn’t lift it from where it’s pressed to her chest.

“Embarrassing,” she makes herself say, makes herself drag the word out of herself just so that he’ll stop looking at her like that with his head tipped to the side, like if he just stares hard enough and long enough the answer to why she won’t let him look at messages he just read, ones she started and never sent, will become apparent to him.

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you ever intending to send those to me?”

“No.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Are you ever going to give me that postcard?”

“I remain unclear as to what to write.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, looking down at the padd she’s clutching.  “Welcome to the club.”

He’s quiet which only makes her all together too ready for his next words, waiting for them, imagining all the different directions the conversation could go, where it might wend and wind from here, all the possibilities that might include.

Her throat feels dry and she wants her water, but won’t reach for it, so she just tries to swallow as best she can.

“There is an official organization?” he asks and she feels the tension break, feels it snap in half and release in a breathy sound that escapes her, one that might just be a laugh.

“No,” she says, reaching back to twist her hair around her hand.  “Yes.  No.”

“Are you uncertain?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says softly, dropping her hair and he nods and she nods and she finally releases her legs, gets herself to sit cross-legged, makes herself put the other padd on the bedside table next to her water, and carefully copy his slides to his data chip and then hand it to him, dropping it into his palm from a careful distance.

She quickly closes the menu he had pulled up, unable to look at those files any more, except that they’re still there, still on her padd, a remnant of when he was gone, across the solar system and beyond the edge of it and she was sitting in her room, toying with her stylus and staring at her comm, stonily silent and still no matter how long she watched it.

And now he’s there beside her, holding the data chip she just handed him, under the same blankets that she is, awake in the middle of the night with her, sharing the soft quiet and darkness of his bedroom.

“You didn’t call me.  When you were gone.  And so I wasn’t sure if I should even-“ She taps her fingers on her padd and looks away from him.  “So I didn’t send them.”

It seems to take him a while to get out words and when she does, she still doesn’t look over at him  “That is spurious reasoning, at best.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ears, adjusting the padd in her lap.  “I also thought it was a good idea to let Kirk drag me into that sim, so I probably shouldn’t be looked to as a font of excellent judgement.”

She think he’ll say something about that, or maybe that he’ll let it slide, not that he’ll drop his voice and tell her quietly, gently,  “I was unaware that you wished for me to contact you.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s not…” She presses her lips together, tucks her hair back again.  “It’s not anything.”

“I see.”

She nods down at her lap, a few strands of hair falling forward and she thinks of pushing them back again, but doesn’t, just picks at a wrinkle in the quilt.

“You called me all the time over the summer,” she hears herself say, unsure of where exactly those words came from.

“That is untrue.”

“No, you did.  Like that night,” she says and watches that spot between his eyebrows crease.  “When your parents were here.”

“I called you because my mother had taken the liberty of inviting you to dinner during your summer recess, after you had spent a weekend away.”

A weekend and another night, he doesn’t say but she hears it anyway.

“Yeah, cause you probably knew there was an eighty percent chance I’d get to see baby pictures of you,” she mutters, feeling her mouth twist on what might be a smile, the echo of that night rising in her, warm and thick.

“More probable than that,” he says and it sounds like it might be a joke, an opportunity to smile broader if she wants to, lean into him and nudge his arm with her own.

“Your paper,” he says gently when she doesn’t move, doesn’t react beyond thinking about his parents being there, in just the next room from where she and he are now, all of them sitting around the table as his father asked her question after question and they ate the dinner that his mother cooked for them.

“Now?” she asks.

“Unless you do not wish to,” he says and she hears the out he’s giving her, the chance to set her padd on the bedside table and ignore the whole thing, to tell him that she’ll do it tomorrow, the next day, the day after that and she either will or she won’t, but he won’t push it, probably won’t ask about it again if she doesn’t bring it up.  Her paper can be left as something she did over the summer, never submitted even though she knows how crazy that is, how completely and utterly illogical it would be to do all that work and not take the final step to complete it.

“What if it doesn’t get published?” she asks, her voice something nearly less than a whisper.

“That is your concern?”

She just lifts her shoulders, picking at the edge of her padd with her nails, staring at the way the blankets fall over her knees, the folds and valleys in them, shadowed in the dark.

“Improbable,” he states.  “Though if you would prefer, you could submit to a less competitive journal in order to increase the likelihood that it is accepted. However, I do not believe that you would find being published in a second tier journal satisfactory.”

“Maybe,” she says and doesn’t stop tapping her nails against the padd and doesn’t look up, so that she’s still staring at the padd in her lap when his hand covers the side, tilting it towards him so that he can bring up the list of journals she’s had saved for weeks now, their submission requirements and upload instructions neatly categorized and right there, waiting for her to do something about it.

He pulls up the Journal of Xenolinguistics Research and then stops, his hand still braced on the padd, the padd still tilted towards him, and her padd still lit, the blue light shining up at her.

“I guess it doesn’t make any sense to you,” she says, staring down at the padd until her eyes don’t focus on it anymore.  “Not submitting it right away.”

“You are uncertain as to the outcome,” he says calmly in that even voice of his, like she wasn’t sure whether to bring a jacket or not when going out when there’s a chance of rain in the forecast, or what dish to order for dinner when she’s not sure what she wants to eat, not the way in which she has delayed sending her paper off to nameless, faceless editors.  It ends up sounding rational in his voice, somehow sensible and understandable when he says it and she presses her lips together tight, nods jerkily, quickly, her eyes still trained on the padd.  “Not being able to predict an outcome is, however, not reason enough to not pursue it.”

She picks at the padd again, her nail flicking against the edge of it.  

“Is that what you think?” she asks, turning to look up at him only to find him watching her.

“Yes.”

She nods again, slower this time.

“And you think this journal is best?”

“It is your choice.”

She lets out a slow breath, her shoulders falling slightly, the motion causing her arm to brush up against his and she leaves it there, her shoulder pressing into his.

“You think it’ll work out?” she asks.

“I do.”

She pauses for just a moment before accessing the file with her finished paper and transmitting it.

“There,” she says into the silence that follows, feeling the word carry out the hard knot that settled into her stomach back in the beginning of the semester, the beginning of the summer maybe, everything that was wrapped up in her paper flowing out of her and leaving her a little loose, untethered in a way that is nearly foreign.  “Just a couple weeks until I hear?”

“Two, maybe three at most.”

She turns over her next few weeks in her mind, the idea of midterms approaching and all that entails now mixing with the thought of waiting for a message in her inbox.

“Guess it’s good that I’m busy then,” she says, slowly turning her padd off.  His hand pulls away when she does but she doesn’t move her shoulder from his.

“A benefit, to be sure.”  He doesn’t move away either and she joins him in staring out across his room, dim again with the screen of the padd darkened.  “Your schedule is overly demanding in the coming weeks?”

She nods, then shrugs, the edge of his sleeve tickling her arm.  “Though not more so than usual.”

“Your classes are still enjoyable?”

She turns slightly to glance up at him.  “Yes.  Thank you for asking.”

“Of course.”

She shoots another look up at him, then bounces her shoulder into his.  “And everything’s better now since I got this new boss.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

“And that the test is over.”

“I would predict as much.”

“And also ever since-“ She pauses, feeling the heat from his body next to hers, staring at the folds of the blankets across their waists, the shape of their legs beneath the the bedspread.  “It was,” she pauses, grimacing, feeling her mouth twist slightly.  “It’s been a really bad semester.”

She listens to the breath he draws in and then lets out again.  “It would be illogical to offer an apology, though I do admit to an understanding of the impetus to do so.”

She pushes her hair back, giving him a small smile.  “Thanks.”

“The term is yet not over.  It will, perhaps, improve,” he points out and she feels a small flare of hope flicker in her chest at the thought.

“I’d like that,” she says softly, letting herself sink towards him, edging slightly nearer to his warmth.  “How has yours been?”

“Perhaps a more difficult transition back from the Enterprise than I anticipated.”  He runs his fingers over the blankets, his hand pale in the darkness of his bedroom against the gray of his bedspread as he smooths out an uneven fold.  “It has been better recently.”

“Good,” she says, watching his hand continue to move over the fabric, those long fingers of his picking it up and adjusting it here and there.

“Better still when your paper is published,” he says, his hand falling still.

That makes her smile, makes her turn and grin at him.  “I sure hope so.”

“If it is not published on your first attempt, it will certainly be accepted elsewhere.”  He’s so close to her that when he turns to look at her, he’s right there, his face nearly difficult to focus on.  “Regardless, the opinions of editors should not and does not detract or diminish the quality of your work.”

“You’re just saying that to be nice,” she says, nudging her shoulder into his, feeling her elbow brush against his own, skin on skin.

“I am not.  That would be illogical,” he says and she swears that he smiles, that the corner of his mouth lifts and she stares at him, taking in the sight, something blossoming in her chest, something small and fragile and tender and warm, not full blown and not substantial, but there.

“Spock,” she says and she leans into him, her arm and shoulder pressed to his, their legs nearly touching beneath the blankets.  “Thank you.”

When he nods, she can feel it, the motion traveling through to her own body and she hopes - she knows, really - that he can hear everything she’s saying.

She watches the way his lips part and his chest rises on a breath, the way he looks away from her for a moment before he meets her eyes again.

“However involuntary, I have caused you pain as a result of the simulation and for that I apologize,” he says in a deep, low voice that rumbles through him and into her where their bodies touch.  

Warmth blooms in her chest at his words, fills her and spreads through her body, a greater and deeper echo of before, and she rubs the back of her knuckles over his hand, runs her fingers over his wrist, light and quick.

“It,” she says, curling her fingers around to touch the thin skin on the inside of his forearm, “Is of no consequence.”

When she looks up from the sight of her fingers on him, the way he turns his palm over so that she can trace over it, soft enough that she can barely feel the familiar prickle that spreads across her hand, he’s looking at her, closer than he was before, and she feels an edge of friction that arcs and snaps between them in the weight of his gaze on her.  She feels her heart slow, or maybe feels it pick up its pace, her focus caught on him so that she’s half unaware of her body. Everything except how he’s looking at her feels far away, so that he’s taking up the entirety of her attention, her mind blank and buzzing.

She watches him look at her mouth, then meet her eyes again, a question in his gaze, and watches him swallow, the line of his throat working.  She doesn’t close her eyes until he’s kissed her, his lips pressing gently, softly to her own, warm against hers and light. 

When he pulls back it’s just a moment later and she feels herself follow him for a second, trying to maintain the touch of his lips on hers.  She can’t, though, doesn’t lean forward more, and opens her eyes to find him watching her, his eyes so soft in the dim light.

“Come here,” she says, shoving her padd off of her lap so that she can better lean towards him, touching her fingers to his cheek, drawing him back to her to kiss again, firmer this time so that she can tug at his bottom lip with her own, let her fingers slide back into his hair and hold him there, their mouths playing slowly over each others, unhurried and leisurely until they break their kiss, both of their breaths coming quick and light.

The idea of his touch is familiar enough now to anticipate, the low burn of want that he stokes in her with those precise movements, the careful, thought out intention behind where his hands touch, how firm his fingers press, how lightly they skate over her skin.  The reality of it is even better than the expectation, immediate and right there after so long, his mouth finding her neck and the way he grips her waist, half turned towards her, half leaning over her so that it’s easy enough to sink back into his bed, his pillows, let his body follow hers down.

“Acceptable?” he asks, his legs tangled with hers, his breath on her mouth and she nods until she can’t anymore because his mouth is under her jaw, hot and wet and slow, so slow as he kisses her skin.

Heat rises liquid in her, deep in her belly, as he edges her shirt up and folds the fabric back, his hands splayed over her hips, her waist, warm on her stomach as they slide higher, pushing the cloth up and up until she raises her arms and lets him skim it off over her head.  Warm air brushes against her bare skin, and his touch is warmer still, kisses pressed to her collarbone and his fingers searching over the dip of her waist, the sensitive skin of her ribs, down over her hip and thigh and back up again so that she raises her leg to press into the contact.

His eyes meet hers from where his mouth is pressed between her breasts, one hand tangled in the band of her panties, pulling at it until she raises her hips for him.  He’s not looking at her anymore, then, moving down her body, his hands gently pushing her legs apart and she presses her head back into the pillows, stares open mouthed at the ceiling at the first touch of his mouth on her.

It’s light at first, makes her squirm closer, shift against the sheets and his grip on her thighs until his hands tighten and his tongue presses harder and she squeezes her eyes shut, her focus narrowed to the movement of his mouth and the heat skating through her belly.

She doesn’t know what to do with her hands, doesn’t want to grab at his hair but needs to grip something, to have something in her hands to anchor herself so she fists her fingers into the pillow beneath her head.  She turns into her own arm to let out a shuddery breath, a sound caught on it that is cut off and needy as his slow, careful touch gives way to a faster rhythm, firmer and more solid.

She looks at him, once, pries her eyes open to find him watching her, and the sight is enough to make her want to close her eyes again, too much and too real with the wet sounds of his mouth, how she can see and feel when his hands dig into her thighs, but she doesn’t, just forces her fingers to open and scratches her nails over his shoulder, grips the back of his neck.

She’s still watching him when he shifts slightly, drops one hand and she feels his fingers slide into her, the motion making her hips rise into him, makes her dig her nails into his skin and hold him there against her, pleasure twisting and hot, pulsing and building and she feels it tighten until it breaks, coursing and rolling through her, a sound drawn out of the back of her throat and her eyes slamming shut.  

He pulls back the moment it becomes too much, squeezes her leg and presses his lips to the inside of her thigh, his breath hot on her skin. She watches him, unfocused and slightly blurry, wipe his mouth on his shoulder in an altogether human gesture.

It’s quiet at he looks at her, her harsh breathing still filling the room, a quiet rustle of blankets as he eases her legs down, her muscles stiff and half aching in a way that is altogether good, a deep near burn that echoes the pleasure still pulsing through her.  His hands slide up the outside of her hips and his thumbs press into the dip of her hipbones, firm enough that it makes her shift against the bed.

“You should-“ She pulls in a breath as she looks down at his hands on her.  “You should take your clothes off.”

“Is that so?”

“Pretty sure that’s what I said,” she tells him.

He slides his hand up to her breast and she just watches for a moment, his long fingers on her, cupping her and playing over her nipple.  He flicks his fingertip across it and she wets her lips, his eyes following the motion.

“Do you want-“ she starts, then her knee bumps against him and she doesn’t bother finishing that question, just reaches towards his nightstand.  She helps him tug his shirt over his head, the condom wrapper crinkling in her palm, and waits while he slips his boxers off so that she’s left to stare at his narrow frame above her, his skin smooth and pale in the darkness.

“Like this?” she asks and he stares down at her until she’s about to repeat the question.

She doesn’t have to because he nods once, quickly, and then she’s fumbling with the packet gracelessly, unrolling the condom over him and spreading her hands on his lower back, his skin fever hot under her palms.  She likes how his muscles flex as he presses into her, his movements slow at first and then stronger as she grips her fingers into him, wraps her legs around his waist and presses her mouth to his shoulder, his neck, wherever she can reach as his breaths come faster. 

She never really looked before and now, even though his bedroom is lit in gray shadows, she’s lost in the sight of him, the ways his shoulders flex, the tightening of the crease between his brows as he moves, how he looks down at her, his gaze soft and then becoming distant, slightly far away until his eyes close.  His dark head bows forward as he comes, a hitching, cut off breath the only sound he makes as his body tenses, and she scrapes her nails down his back, scratches her fingers through his hair and holds him against her, his skin sticky against her own, everything overheated and the air humid in the space between their bodies.

“No, don’t,” she requests, doesn’t and won’t loosen her arm laying across his shoulders when he goes to move away, his hand reaching between them for the condom as he finally pulls out of her.  She can’t keep him there, not really, not if he decides to get up and she watches the way he looks at her, the bathroom, the condom, uncertainty creasing the corners of his eyes, just slightly.  She’s unsure, too, of his skin still pressed to hers, the way she’s clutching at him, but she’s certain, completely and utterly in a way that makes her heart hammer, that if he stands and moves away from her, they won’t get back to this spot, that the only way to be like this is to stay right there, unmoving and still.

His body slackens under her hands, finally, and she leans up to kiss him, to card her fingers through his hair and keep him there against her, heavy and warm and good like that, a solid pressure against her that makes her curl her leg over his, rake her toes down his calf and push her nose into his cheek when they break their kiss.

She’s pretty sure that the condom ends up on the floor but she doesn’t check, her face pressed into his neck and a sigh breathed over his skin when his arms come around her, pulling her into his body.

His fingers find hers, twine together, and she falls asleep like that, too warm and pressed up against him on the edge of the bed with not enough room, her dreams a swirl of hot sand and a hotter sun.


	30. Chapter 30

“Nyota,” she hears, which is somewhat better than the blare of her alarm, but worse than sleeping, so she rolls over, away from the sound, turning her face into the pillow to seek out the last moments of rest that she can.

“Nyota,” Spock says again and she raises a hand to rub over her eyes, blinks them open and looks back over her shoulder just long enough to take in his undershirt and uniform pants before she burrows into the pillow again and tugs the sheet up, unwilling to let go of it or the heavy, sweet feeling of sleeping in a bed that isn’t a dorm bed, in a room that doesn’t have Gaila already chattering, just the quiet of his apartment and the soft note in his voice.

“I did not know when you needed to wake,” he says.

She yawns, nods, and pushes out a bleary, “Ok.”

“That is not an answer.”

“That wasn’t a question,” she mumbles, burrowing down into the pillow, unwilling to let thoughts of the day invade the softness of the bed.

“I suppose,” he says and from his voice it sounds like he might be smiling, just a little, but in order to find out she’d have to open her eyes all the way and that feels too hard, too much and too difficult when the alternative is pushing her cheek into his pillowcase. 

“It’s too early for semantics, Spock,” she says through another yawn, nestling deeper into his bed.  “You’re going to have to hold off until I’ve had coffee.”

A lot of things can wait until after coffee, like the fact that she should maybe feel slightly strange about the fact that she’s waking up in his bed, that he’s in his uniform and that she’s covered only by the sheet, that everything that happened yesterday - and last night - happened, but mostly she just feels tired, too drained and sleepy and not quite ready to face the day.

“I will await the continuation of this discussion with great anticipation,” he says, then pauses for just a second, just long enough that she pulls the sheet a little snugger and starts to feel like she wants to close her eyes again.  The day is out there, somewhere beyond the walls of his apartment and she’s in here, in his bed, which she’s willing to not think about too hard if it means another few moments of peace. “You would like coffee?”

She rolls onto her back, shoving her hair out of her face to find him watching her, not sitting next to her on the bed but just standing there, oddly tall and upright from her vantage point.

She decides that wants to stay still like that instead of getting up, in the rumpled bed, and not care about how her hair is, where the edge of the sheet has gotten to, what she’s doing there still half asleep and muddled, her body heavy from having just awoken and her mind not quite caught up on everything that happened in the wake of the test, her memory of the sim mixing with that of his arms around her and hot skin pressed to hers, the darkness of his bedroom surrounding them and the quiet of only their breathing, how it felt to fall asleep with his body against hers.

It’s brighter, now.  Louder, with the day starting outside, traffic whizzing past on the street, and he’s not next to her anymore, but is standing there in his instructor’s pants, already shaved and probably showered, so that she feels a step behind, unable to do much more than blink and stretch out the kinks in her back, her body heavy with the reminder of his hands on her, his mouth.

“Not if you’re going,” she says, making herself sit up instead of settling further into his bed. She tries to comb her hands through her hair, stifling another yawn into her wrist as the grip of sleep begins to leave her.  He doesn’t answer so she gestures towards his mostly dressed state, his perfectly crisp and neatly creased pants and his black jacket that must be around here somewhere, a contrast that’s too hard to think about with the fact that the sheet is mostly tangled around her legs.  “I’ll get up, I don’t mean to be in your way.”

“I am not,” he says quickly, then shakes his head in what strikes her as an overly redundant gesture and an odd one at that, from someone like him.  “And you are not.”

“Ok,” she says, though as soon as she does she’s suddenly unsure as to whether she was just responding to what he said, accepting that he didn’t wake her up because he needs to get going and get started on his day and she was sound asleep in his bed, or if she just said yes to a cup of coffee.

Which she does want, except that it’s his apartment and he’s dressed for work, or nearly so, and she’s not dressed at all.

When she tugs the sheet higher and looks around, she’s hardly surprised to find her clothes neatly placed on his dresser, a sight that is slightly too normal for the fact that she wasn’t entirely certain she was supposed to stay over last night, or to be here still, now, with the morning light streaming in. The weak, early sun is glinting off his insignia, set there next to her uniform and she blinks at it, willing both into something that is less suggestive of all of the reasons she needs to stand up.

And why she needs that coffee, which he may or may not have just offered her.

He’s just standing there, offering no clues as to his interpretation and still just looking at her, leaving her overly aware of being there in his bed, the silence hanging between them, broken only by the faint sounds of cars outside.

She wonders if she should pull the sheet up even further, but doesn’t, just leaves it there because it’s easier to dig her forefingers into her eyes in an effort to shake off sleep than it is to pretend that they haven’t done this before, her waking up in his bed with the scent of his skin still clinging to hers.

“What time is it?” she asks, trying and failing to find the answer with no alarm clock on the bedside table and no voices of cadets in the hallway as they leave for breakfast and classes.

Which she needs to think about.  Deal with.  It’s not the summer and it’s not the weekend, it’s a Wednesday morning and midterms are starting soon and rolling back over, sinking down into the pillow and dragging the blanket over herself again as she slips into the quiet and warmth and peace of Spock’s apartment isn’t really an option as much as she wants it to be.

“0623,” he answers and she feels herself nod.  

She has sociolinguistics first thing, and then her Cardassian exam and that paper due on Friday and she needs to not be laying in bed, except all of that feels so far away with waking up in a bed that is not her bed, in a room that is not her room, and with Spock standing there quiet and composed instead of how Gaila is likely, this very moment, both dressing and packing her bag and finishing an assignment, and would be talking to Nyota if she were there and not still in Spock’s bed with him still looking at her.

“I have work to do,” she says, makes herself actually articulate the words so that the different setting and calm of his apartment, the muted noise and soft light and grays of his bedspread don’t let her forget the fact that now that she’s up, she has things that she needs to get to.

“Of course,” he says and she watches the way his eyes flick over her and then move towards the nightstand, where her padds are placed neatly and exactly on the corner.  She wonders where exactly her personal one had ended up last night, that it’s now sitting there, stacked on top of her other one.  It was pushed deep into the blankets, she’s pretty sure, shoved under his sheets and comforter and forgotten.

“It would seem,” he says, his head slightly cocked to the side and his eyes still on the padds until they’re back on hers again, “That you are suitably able to do so without much effort.”

She stares over at her padds, how perfectly placed they are, her hands twisting in her hair, running it through her fingers over and over again.  “Cardassian is always an effort, unfortunately.”

“Hence the need for coffee.”

“Hence,” she agrees, finds that she’s smiled without realizing she had done so and then he’s gone with another quick glance over her.

She finds him at the table when she’s dressed, when she’s smoothed out the bed as well as she can, and when she’s picked up her padds, tapping them idly against her palm as she watches the way he looks up from his own when she walks out of his bedroom, the way his back straightens even further as he sits up and his focus snaps from what he was reading to look right at her.

“The faculty replicators were upgraded at the beginning of the school year,” he says before she can find a way to greet him, unsure exactly of what to say now that she’s up and in her uniform and the quiet that passed between them last night has been traded for neatly pressed clothes and the padds she has in her hands, the one he has on the table in front of him, the workday stretching before them both.  

“I did not realize that the memory systems were reset to the degree to which they were,” he continues when she doesn’t say anything.  “Coffee is no longer programmed in the existing database, nor do I have the apparatus that the Captain did.”

“I can live my entire life without using a coffee maker again,” she assures him, taking another step towards him and tapping her padds against her palm again.

“I apologize.”

“It’s really no problem,” she says, making her hands still when she starts to want to fidget with her padd again.  “And I meant what I said that I don’t want to bother you.”

“As did I,” he says, then pushes his chair back in a way that seems slightly jarring, like there’s an edge to his movements that isn’t normally there.  “I have tea.”

“Of course you do.”

“If you would like a cup.”

“Right,” she says, hitting her padds into her palm again.

“You would, then.”

She takes him in, standing there like that a few inches from his chair, a mug with steam curling up from it placed next to his padd which is lined up with the edge of the table, precise and exact like her padds were on the nightstand.

“It is caffeinated,” he offers.  “And due to your clear enthusiasm surrounding trying new foods and drinks, it is only logical that you do so at every available opportunity.”

“If it’s…” she starts, then traces her fingers over her padds, runs her nails over the edge of them, thinking of the mess hall, packed with cadets at this hour, and thinking of the empty chairs around his table, neatly pushed in and perfectly aligned, how silent it is when neither of them are speaking.  “If it’s logical.”

“It is.”

“Good.”

She doesn’t quite know what to do with herself while he makes the tea so she sits at his table, trying to not stare at how his shirt shifts against his back as he fills her mug.

She also doesn’t quite know what to say to him when he sets it in front of her and sits across from her, curling one large hand around his own mug and raising it to take a sip.

But they’ve done this before. All of it, the tea, the early morning, the prickle of her skin as she looks at his fingers and can’t help but remember his touch.

“Thanks,” she says and when he looks up from studying his tea she nods to her own.

“It is acceptable?”

She hasn’t tried it yet, but nods anyway. “It is.”

He takes another sip, replaces the mug on the table and stares down into again. 

“Are you well?” he asks, his words an echo of the night before, and his voice interrupting her thoughts and she pulls her attention away from his fingers and the memory of them tracing over her skin.

“I slept great, thank you.”

“Rather,” he says, turning his mug slightly and then gripping it again.  “I meant in reference to the Kobayashi Maru.”

“I know.”  The tea is too hot so she can only manage a small sip, the spice of it unfamiliar to her and jarring after so many mornings of coffee.  Not bad, though.  Different.  “I’m fine.”

“You do not sound certain.”

“I’m not.”

She can feel his eyes on her as she takes another sip before she sets the mug back on the table, held carefully between her hands until her palms are warmed through.  She waits for him to say something and he doesn’t, just sits there holding his own cup, and she sits there holding hers, trying to not think too hard about the way she gripped him last night, pulled him against her and didn’t let him go.

“It’s a lot to take in,” she finally says, landing upon the words like they can hold both the fact of her sitting at his table sharing the morning with him, her skin still tingling with the so recent memory of his body pressed to hers as well as the fact that her GPA crashed and burned in the space of a single afternoon and evening.

She can feel his eyes on her while he waits for her to speak, waits while she just sits there, watching the steam from her mug float up and up, quickly at first as it curls this way and that, and then slower as the mug cools under her palms.

“I guess I don’t exactly know where to go from here,” she gets out since it’s honest at least and she can’t figure out anything better, not in the muddled swirl that is her thoughts when she tries to focus on whatever path success at the Academy will look like now.

“Class, I presume.”

“Class,” she repeats to herself, shaking her head at him and raising her mug to take another drink from it.  It’s good, she decides.  Not exactly what she’s used to each morning, but good.

She shakes her head again, slower this time, staring down into her mug as she does it.  “I meant…”

“If you are anxious that your simulation scores will negatively affect your future postings, you can rest assured that all cadets take the same tests.”

“I know,” she says, because she does.  He said that, last night, sitting next to her and it means that Pike did, and Puri, and Stoyer too, which eases some of the leftover ache in her chest.  “But you know Barrett?”

“I do.”

She looks up from her mug at him.  “That was a rhetorical question, he’s in the department.  You’ve had him in class.”

“I see.”

“Um,” she says, slightly thrown by the sudden stillness around Spock, different than earlier, something shifted in how he’s sitting, but she just plows onwards, fumbling for words in the way he’s suddenly watching her like that.  “Anyway, he did that semester on the Potemkin.  And Ho once told me that there are all of those off planet internships?  Over the summers?  So I don’t know, but…”

She shrugs, drags her mug towards her across the table and raises it to take a sip, feeling the steam drift warm across her face.

“You wish to study off planet?”

“Maybe,” she says.  “No.  Not really because there’s so much to do here and I have my entire career to travel.”  She sets her mug down and twists it back and forth.  “What I want is to be assigned to the posting I apply for a year and a half from now when I’m finished here and I just want the best shot that I can have.”

“Your transcript is already sufficiently exemplary that you-“

“-No,” she says.  “It’s not.  Not anymore, and it’s-“  She cuts herself off, drags in a breath that makes her chest rise so that she sits up in her chair a little, pushes her shoulders back.  “It’s too hard here to not give myself that chance, to go through four years of this and not to have done everything possible to ensure my career gets off to a good start.”

“Your posting will depend on much more than your grade point average,” he says.

“I know, you’ve told me that.”

“Then I will greatly anticipate the day that you listen to me.”

“I listen,” she says automatically.  “I always listen to you.”

“You do not.”

“I do too.  Last night,” she says, her hands tightening on her cup.  “And before.  Other times.”

“Other times?” he quotes back at her.

“You told me…” she says and she has to stop, think.  “Over the summer, in the car, that, well, you told me that I should do other things than just work.  Undertake diverting activities, whatever.”

“Recall is not comprehension.”

“But I’m working for you, and I just said that maybe this summer, or next semester I would do something else too, in addition to that, find something that I can-“

“-If you are undertaking those experiences as a way to simply bolster your resume, then I-“

“-God, why else would I, Spock?” she asks and quiet follows her words, his mouth pressed tight before he seems to consciously relax himself.

“I presumed that your work was in service to actual enjoyment of the subject you are pursuing.”

“It is.”

“Very well.”  

“I like what I do,” she says, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back in her chair.  

When he just takes another sip of his tea, his eyes trained on the steam, she uncrosses her arms, moves back towards the table, her fingers tapping against the handle of her mug.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Pardon?”

“For-“ She waves towards him, her mouth open to speak, though it takes a moment for anything to come out.  “Being concerned.  About me.  Last night, too.”

“You have already thanked me.”

“Well maybe I’m just uncertain that your comprehension levels are any better than my own.”

“Truly?”

“No.”

She drinks half of her tea while he sits there quietly, occasionally sipping at his own but more often just examining it.  She joins him in his perusal, looking at how his hands hold his mug, and once or twice raising her gaze to take in the way the morning light brings out the brown in his eyes and the softness around his mouth.

“If it’s any consolation,” she says, watching him raise his mug to take another sip, “I drive Gaila nuts too.”

“Vulcans are not prone to being consoled.”

“I’m just saying that if you want to commiserate, I’m sure she’s all for it.  She even made a list of nuts, if you need a review.  Macadamia.  Brazil.  Almonds.  Pistachios.  Not peanuts, she looked it up and had a hay day when she found out they’re legumes.”

“Hay day,” he repeats quietly as if to himself and she watches the way his mouth forms the words, how his focus draws inward like he can figure out the expression if he just thinks about it long enough before he looks at her again, his eyes creasing at the corner and his head tipped slightly to the side.

He opens his mouth once and then twice before he speaks again.

“I have found that at times you do not take the time to fully consider what I am attempting to tell you,” he says and she goes to ask what, exactly, he means, starts to tell him to be more specific or precise or accurate, how he normally is with his overly exacting scrupulousness with how he speaks, but he’s staring over her shoulder, not looking at her, and his hand is pressed palm down on the table, not curled around his mug, and his shoulders are tight in a way they weren’t, some tension in his frame that she wants to lean over and shake out of him, wants to rub away with her hand to his shoulder or with her thumb smoothing that crease that’s formed between his brows.

“Spock?”

“Would you like breakfast?” he asks, standing and pushing his chair in.  He’s in the kitchen before she can react, before she can get another look at his face, not that she doesn’t try, craning her neck after him as he walks away.

She’s halfway through her bowl of whatever it is that he served them, some type of grain that she would call porridge if she didn’t think he’d just automatically correct her when she drops her spoon, pushes her padd away - the one she got out after he returned to his own, seemingly uninterested in further discussion with her - and looks up at him.

“I do listen.”

“You are studying currently,” he says, the hand that was scrolling through his padd raised to gesture to her own.

“Just don’t tell me that I don’t listen to you, because I do.”

“Very well.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Multiple studies have shown that memorization takes place best over a long period of time, so reviewing your materials now is of no use to you. If you took a more rational approach, it would free your schedule up in order to-”

“Rational…” she starts, staring at him.  “This is what works for me.”

He pulls his spoon through his food, looks up at her, blinks, and looks back down.

“I apologize.”

“It’s fine.”

“I was simply trying to be of assistance.”

“I know.”  She watches his shoulders straighten and the way he takes a bite of his breakfast, and then another one.  “Hey,” she says, reaching out and catching what would be the edge of his sleeve if he was in his uniform.  He’s not.  He’s in his slacks and an undershirt and is barefoot as he sits with her and eats the breakfast he made them, so her fingers fall on bare skin, his wrist bony and slim.

“It is-“

“-Sweet of you,” she corrects before he can dismiss what she said, tell her it doesn’t matter.  

His skin is soft under her fingers and she doesn’t know if she really ever took the time to notice that before, how delicate and thin the skin covering the inside of his wrist is.  

“Anyway,” she says, clears her throat and pulls her hand back from him, rubbing her thumb against her fingertips.

“Anyway?” he echoes when she doesn’t continue, just looks at the table, their tea, their padds and that look he gets when he’s confused but doesn’t want to admit to it. It’s like how it was, she doesn’t say, just takes another bite.  Back over the summer, how it was between them, when Taele was around and they spent so much of their time together, before he left and that silence ever had a chance to grow between them.

“What are you reading?” she asks, stirring her breakfast.  It’s good, too, warm and comforting and nothing at all like anything she’s had in the mess hall, or could probably find there since he made it from scratch while she watched him between quizzing herself for her test.

“As of now, my messages.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Hardly.”

“Then will you tell me about your trip?” she asks and he looks up at her, his eyes coming to meet hers and his hand stilling on his padd.  “If you have time, if you’re not-“ She gestures to his padd, his hand still hovering over it.  “Busy.  Reading boring messages.  It’d be rational, which I hear is your favorite, since we never really got a chance to talk about it.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Anything. Everything,” she says, makes herself turn off her padd and watches how his eyes follow her movements. “Though if I do poorly on my exam, I’m blaming it squarely on you.”

“Acceptable.”

There’s something bright in his eyes as he talks, something that’s subtle and understated, but there, clear enough that she notices it and watches it, how one eyebrow moves as he tells her about a modification Puri’s hoping to make to the biobeds, and once, the corner of his mouth curls when he speaks about the reconfigured bridge stations and the added terminals Pike requested, so that the bridge crew is larger than on most other ships.

“You think that’s better?” she asks, watching him wash their bowls.  “Rather than keeping the bridge quieter and smaller?”

“Having only senior staff on the bridge can be inefficient, especially as we are so often required to serve on away missions,” he says as he puts their dishes away and shuts the cabinet.

“Do you get to go on all of them?”

“As first officer, yes, or nearly all.  When I was serving on the Lexington as an assistant scientist, I only beamed down as needed.”

“How many times was that?” she asks, trailing after him as he picks up his comm from his desk and puts it next to his padd on the table, and then follows him into his bedroom before stopping by the door and hovering there, unsure of what to do with herself as he takes one of the instructor’s jackets from his closet.

“Individual trips via the transporter or discrete away missions?”

She watches the way he pins his insignia on it, his long fingers moving quickly.  

“Away missions,” she says.  “Planets, whichever.”

“Twenty three planets.”

“No,” she says, leaning against his doorway as he gets out a pair of socks.

“You disagree?”

“You saw twenty three planets?”

“I saw fifty four planets while deployed.  I beamed down to twenty three on away missions and two while on shore leave.”

“What were they like?”

“Spherical.”

“Spock.”

“That was their most obvious shared characteristic.”

“Give me those socks so I can throw them at you.”

He doesn’t, but she swears his mouth curls again in a way that makes her want to walk towards him to get a better look.

“You speak Algedian,” he says as he neatly lays his jacket on the end of his bed and sits next to it to pull on his socks.

“Did you go to Deneb Algedi V?” she asks and does take a step closer to him, pushing off the doorway.  “Really?  How was it?  Did you see the bioluminescent rain?”

“Yes.  Cold, and yes.”

“Cold?” She walks towards him, stands there as he puts on his second sock.  “So was the rain brighter than normal?  Because I heard that in their winter, it’s so bright that you can see it during the day, especially if the clouds are dark enough.”

“That is accurate.”

“You never told me you went there,” she says.  “And don’t try to tell me that it’s because I didn’t ask.”

“Rather,” he says as he stands and she realizes how close she got to him now that he’s not sitting but is putting on his jacket, not quite enough room between them so that his movements are slightly abbreviated.  “It is due to the fact that to discuss every language that you speak would leave us with insufficient time to be punctual for the start of the work day.”

“I should study abroad before I graduate,” she says as she gets herself to step back from him so that he has room to zip up his jacket, though his hands still on the zipper and he looks up at her.  “Just so that- I want to see those places too, I meant.”

“You will.”

“Hopefully.”

“So it was raining,” she says when he is still standing there with his jacket half zipped.

He pulls it up the rest of the way, raises that eyebrow too, and she sighs, smiles, reaches out to nudge his arm. 

“Indeed it was.”

“Stop,” she instructs.  “I know it was raining.”

“Then why-“

“C’mon,” she says, nudges him again. “Story, I want the story.”

Stepping outside drains some of the warmth that’s settled in her chest as he continues his description of the rain, the planet, what he did there and she makes herself focus on the sound of his voice, how he matches his pace to hers so that they could be walking towards the library on a sunny summer afternoon, not to campus at the beginning of a workday, when she has classes waiting for her, a test, and then homework and a paper to write.

That little rushing buzz that took up residence so gradually over the course of the morning is nearly gone by the time they get to the Xenolingistics building, his words cut off twice by different officers greeting him, both times giving her a quick look as they passed by, and both times Spock taking a long moment to begin talking again.

It’s too jarring, the clamor of voices and the bustle around them, cadets walking this way and that, officers mixed in with the crowd so that all she wants to do is to crawl back into bed, pull the covers up and forget about all this, the day stretched out in front of her and the drain of energy it will take to get through her classes, meetings, and her test to make it to the evening.

And then it’s worse because when she turns to say goodbye to Spock - he has something, Interspecies Ethics, maybe, or another class - Ho is beside them.

“Morning, Commander, Cadet,” she says and Nyota drags her bag further up her shoulder, gets herself to produce a crisp ‘sir’ even though half of her feels left behind in the sunlight and warmth of Spock’s apartment, wanting another cup of tea and another few moments of that warm, easy quiet of his rooms.

“Commander,” Spock echoes and Nyota can’t help but look up at him, with the sunlight falling over him and how still he is, standing there with the swirl of people walking past them, Ho already chatting again.

“Big night next week,” Ho says. “I just got the invite.”

“Did you,” Spock says and Nyota feels him shift slightly, his arm brushing against hers as he turns towards her, just a little bit. She tries to not look at the place their sleeves touch, tries to not take in the difference in color and fabric and Ho standing there, still talking.

“I can’t believe they’ve put the event together so quickly, with all of you being back so soon, but that’s Ops for you, I guess, nothing like how long it takes to get our servers upgraded,” Ho continues. “Or a starship built.”

“The Enterprise?” Nyota asks, her attention off of where Spock’s arm is definitely touching hers now and on him instead, on Commander Ho as she looks back and forth between them. “I thought you said it wasn’t going to be done until next year.” The words rush and tumble out of her, her stomach twisting. He did say that, before, earlier, months ago maybe but he definitely said that the ship wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, that there was more that needed to be done and that-

“It will not,” he says. “And a celebration of the completion of space trials is illogical. The use of Starfleet resources on such an event is wasteful and an irrational allocation, especially considering how much time officers will spend in attendance when they could be engaged in more useful tasks and especially when construction is not yet finished.” 

“Tell that to officers looking forward to a free dinner,” Ho says.

“There is no charge for the mess hall, nor the officers lounge.”

“They’re the same replicators,” Ho says to Nyota with a smile, then gives them both a wave. “Have a good class, Commander. See you inside, Uhura.”

When Ho has jogged up the steps, Nyota’s left there with him slightly too tense next to her, and she stares up at the building in front of them, shifts her arm against his. 

She could point out that Vulcan ceremonies last for hours.  Days.  She’s pretty sure she’s heard of one or two that are as long as a week and involve most people in the community. She doesn’t though, just stands there for another moment with him.

“You have to go?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you could adjust another coolant valve and check for faulty o-rings.”

“Chief Engineer Olson made the necessary replacements.”

His hand is tight around his padd, his fingers that were once burned and bandaged now pressing against the edge of it.

“Too bad,” she says and pulls her attention away before he can catch her looking at him, and before anyone else can either, the skin on her neck nearly itching with the reality that they’re standing on a busy path in the middle of campus and the creeping certainty that more than one person has turned to look at her.

“I’ll take the slides for you, I have Orthography first thing anyway,” she offers into the silence between them, nodding up at the steps Ho just went up and trying to push back against that feeling of stiffness between them with so many people walking by, the rigidity of campus and the Academy inflexible and unbending around them as they stand there. “If you want.  I can put them in your office, I’m going right by there.”

“Thank you.”

“Sure,” she answers, probably needlessly as he hands her his padd.

“I copied them already,” he says, nodding towards it in a way that he probably doesn’t need to, since she can see that it’s not his data chip that he’s handing her.

“Ok.”

“Bringing that to my office is appreciated.”

“It’s no problem.”  She folds the padd under her arm and then just stands there for a moment, looking up at him.  “Have a good day,” she says and gives him a small smile goodbye, smaller than it feels like it should be after he made her breakfast and tea, sat up half the night with her, but two offers walk past right then and she can’t get herself to do anything more.

She thinks about his apartment again, tries not to. She’s holding his padd with the slides on it for the class she’s his TA for, she’s in the middle of campus in her uniform with a day of classes and meetings and an exam waiting for her, and there’s no time or space for her to be thinking about the his low voice in the quiet of the night, or any of the other nights they’ve spent together, nor their conversation that morning or what it was like to begin her day with him instead of with Gaila and the hundreds of other cadets in the mess hall.

“Heard you took the Kobayashi Maru,” Nyota hears as she begins to climb the steps and turns to find that Hannity is walking next to her, a small, gentle smile on her face.  “You ok?”

“Fine, thanks,” Nyota says, glancing at the other woman and trying not to look for Spock again, probably by now lost in the crowd, though she’s sure she could find him if she searched long enough, that way he walks and holds himself discernible even among so many others.  

“It’s a hard one.”

“It was ok,” Nyota says, which makes Hannity smile broader and shake her head as the doors to the building part in front of them.

“You’re tough as nails, Uhura,” she says, then casts a look back towards the doors as they slide shut behind them, leaving them in the quieter lobby, not entirely empty but more so than the quad was.   “Speaking of…”

“Yes?” Nyota prompts as she pushes the button for the turbo lift, since Hannity’s words have trailed off and the other woman is just looking at her, eyebrows raised and tiny smile playing over her mouth.

“I heard something else about you,” Hannity says quickly, her smile growing slightly.

“Heard what?” Nyota asks, that same prickle skittering over her neck, so that her hand tightens on Spock’s padd. She stares up at the indicator on the turbo lift, waiting for the doors to part instead of looking at Hannity.

Three other cadets join them, though it doesn’t make Hannity’s grin fade, not during the ride and not when Nyota ducks out on the floor with Spock’s office.

She sets the padd on his desk, right in the middle of the surface where he’ll see it, then stands there for a moment, considering it, the relative quiet of the halls that means she has a minute or two before classes start, and then down at her bag where her comm is tucked away.

“Hey,” she says when Spock answers.

“That is an illogical greeting.”

“Sorry,” she says, smiles at the comm in her hand. “I have a quick question.”

“You are in my office?” he asks and she thinks of him calculating the distance from where she left him, how fast she walks, how long she would have to wait for the turbo lift.

“Good guess.”  She reaches out and adjusts the padd, pushes it until it’s more neatly lined up with the handful of other objects he keeps on his desk.  “Listen, I have a minute before class, do you want me to upload the slides so that the students can see them ahead of time?  Machesky never did, but it was nice last semester when you posted them, so…”

“Please. If it is convenient for you.”

“I have time,” she tells him. “I’ll do it now.”

“There is no rush.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” she says, thumbing his padd on.  “If I can find them.”

“The menu on the top left.”

“I got it, I got it,” she says, scanning the list of his most recently accessed documents, looking for the slides and tapping the first on the list that comes up.

Which is not them.  Instead of his slides for class it’s a list of replicator codes, line after line of them that she mouths to herself, quietly so that he can’t hear, before she jerks her hand away, closes the document and fumbles to open the next one on the list, unsure of how exactly she recognizes the codes for coffee, but only that she does and that he was reading them this morning, that they were sitting there on his padd as they ate breakfast.

“A minute exactly?” he repeats and she realizes she hasn’t spoken.

“Forty five seconds, realistically.  Maybe fifty.  To be precise,” she hears herself say.

“Precision is important.”

“You want…”  She stares down at his padd, shakes herself and makes herself focus.  “I should upload all of the slides?  Or just for the next class?”

“Whichever you prefer,” he says,   “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

“Another colloquialism.”

“Colloquialisms are interesting,” she tells him.  “I told you, I like what I do.”

“I am aware,” he says, then pauses, and then she’s listening to a stream of his words, coming faster than normal.

“Nyota, this morning I wished to say more clearly that you should cultivate that which you find enjoyable, and while that is difficult due to the demands of the Academy, it is necessary to focus on the aspects of your field that brought you here, so that your work is not simply for the sake of a future return on your effort but rather so that your time is spent in ways that are fulfilling to you personally, and which you derive satisfaction from.  Delaying such gratification until some unspecified future time is illogical, as earning your commission is not a turning point, but instead the commencement of an equally demanding stage of your career, one which continues indefinitely.”

“That’s-“

“-As past experience is indicative of future outcomes, you will in all likelihood be driven to receive further promotions and more desirable postings and very probably will continue to not set aside time for yourself personally, which will inevitably lead to eventual dissatisfaction and exhaustion, especially if you lose sight of what drew you to your work initially and only are continuing to achieve for the sake of advancement alone.”

She wonders if he can hear her swallow or if the pickup on her comm isn’t good enough for that.

She stares across his office, makes herself stop tapping her nails against his padd and then starts again, the noise they make a quick, hard scrabble against the hard surface.

“Well,” she says, looking around his empty office, down at his desk, over at his bookshelf where he was standing that day he got back to Earth, right there, looking at that shelf and the padds neatly arranged on it, then back at the one she has in front of her.  “If you know me so well, it’s the Uzuri blend that’s best.  Dark roast.”

“Is it.”

“It is.”

“Duly noted,” he says.

“You should…” She drags her fingers against his desk, picks up the postcard he still has there, right where it was yesterday when she was in here, all that time ago that somehow fit into an afternoon, an evening, the moments that passed between them last night and this morning, despite how few hours that seems for how much happened.  She fingers the edge of it, stares down at the blue planet, thinks of him picking it out for her, bringing it back to Earth and it sitting there now, blank, propped up on his desk.  “You should try it sometime. I heard it’s logical.”

“Perhaps I will.”

She has class and she likes to get there early to get her favorite seat and get her notes arranged and go through the readings once more, just to glance over them and jog her memory. The lecture hall is two floors up and so she needs to go, now.

She stands there for a long time staring down at his padd after they’ve said their goodbyes, and it’s not until the screen dims and then shuts off that she leaves, steps out into the bustle of the hall and the stream of cadets, his office door sliding shut behind her.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters 31, 32, and 33 are really all part of one whole, broken up only so that the pacing is a bit better. The next two chapters will be posted shortly! And as ever, thank you thank you for your enjoyment and enthusiasm and cheerleading. We’re in the home stretch and this has been so wonderful over these last months (very nearly a year now!). We’re not done yet, but closing in on it and watching the end draw near makes me think about how this would not have been so special without all of you, and how deeply and truly thankful I am for each and every kudos/favorite/review/comment/tumblr ask etc, since the response has been many and varied and it always, without fail, makes me smile and keeps this story going in a very real way.

“Do you want to work on the Enterprise?” Nyota asks, dropping her stylus onto her padd and blinking against the late afternoon sun at Gaila, trying to look at her and not at the fact that Spock just left N'Aeriun Hall with Lieutenant Rand walking beside him.

“You told me that Spock told you to have more fun.  I’m thinking that he would say that this does not qualify,” Gaila says, not bothering to conceal her interest in watching them, even though it makes Nyota want to tell her to stop.

“When we’re done here,” Nyota asks instead, because she’s still not looking over there, at how Rand is nodding at something Spock said.  “Do you ever think about what posting you want?”

“I’m thinking about what bar we’re going to tonight.  It’s Friday, McCoy’s off and your paper will be done.  There are drinks to be had, Ny, not assignments a year and a half away to worry about.”

“I’m not worrying, I’m curious.”

“You’re always worrying,” Gaila corrects, yawning and turning onto her stomach, stretched out across the grass so that her hair and uniform stand out in bright contrast to all the green.

“I just want to know if you ever wonder where you’re going to end up.”

“I’m going to end up at the bar in an hour,” Gaila says, her voice muffled by her arms.  “And then someone’s bed.  Not mine, since my roommate has this thing against me bringing people back.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“It’s not.”

Nyota taps her stylus against the edge of her padd, staring out across the quad from their vantage point on the small hill that Gaila chose, the one that Cochrane Hall sits on, where Nyota needs to drop off her paper soon.  Really soon, actually, which means she needs to finish it, but instead she watches the cadets and officers walk back and forth, going this way and that as they head to their last meetings of the week or leave their final classes, all of them flowing around the still forms of Spock and Rand, still standing there engrossed in their conversation.

Gaila flips onto her back again and Nyota finds herself pinned with a hard stare.

“You’re still thinking about it.”

“I am not,” Nyota says, immediately looking down at her paper and scrolling down to the next paragraph.  “I’m proofreading.”

“You’re worrying.”

“I told you I’m not.”

“You’re worrying there might be a misspelled word somewhere in the perfectly perfect paper you just spent two days writing, and you’re worrying that you’ll be assigned to an outpost on the Outer Rim coding translators for the rest of your career, and you’re worrying that you don’t know when the next time it’ll be that you’ll end up in bed with one Commander Spock.  Kinda hard to wait on that last one, judging by the look on your face the other day.”

“Gaila, please.”

“Gaila, please tell me it’ll be ok?” Gaila asks, which only makes Nyota bend further over her padd.  “Or Gaila please stop reminding me of the fact I never came home the other night - I waited up, I’ll have you know.  And I kicked Kirk out, just in case you weren’t going to get naked with a certain Commander.”

“Please stop.  Anyone could hear you.”

“You stop.  You’re going to lose a half a point, at most, for having a typo - which probably doesn’t exist since you’ve read that over three time now - you are going to get your top choice for a posting, second choice at the absolute worse and probably with the option to transfer within six months, and as for the wait for your third and major concern of the day, the anticipation makes it that much better.  Just look at him,” Gaila sighs.  “He is a tall glass of water now isn’t he.”

“Don’t.”  It comes out harsher than she intended, and she ducks towards her padd, shoots a quick look over at Gaila, seeing her watching her and wishing she wouldn’t.  “Sorry.”

“Well now.”

“Well now, what?” Nyota asks when Gaila doesn’t continue, just sits there, a smile playing across her face.

“I don’t know, humans just say that sometimes.”

“It’s supposed to be followed up by something,” Nyota says, as she pushes back against the irritation Gaila’s comment stirred.  It’s not as if she doesn’t talk about everyone like that, and it’s not as if Nyota hasn’t heard it before, and it’s not as if Spock hasn’t been the object of her attention, back last semester when spring was edging into summer.  It’s fine.  Doesn’t bear thinking about, really.

“It’s nothing, it’s a strange phrase anyway,” Nyota says, pressing her lips together as she tries to start reading her paper again.  “And it’s drink, not glass.”

“Drink,” Gaila echoes.  “Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

Gaila sits there, tapping the toes of her boots together, leaning back on her hands as she keeps staring across the quad and Nyota continues to try to focus on the padd in her lap.  “I am sorry, though.”

“It’s fine.”

“I just don’t want you to think-”

“I don’t.”

“Cause you really shouldn’t be concerned,” Gaila says and Nyota begins to correct her again, only to realize that Gaila isn’t looking at her, her eyes bright and sparkling, but out across the quad, right at where Spock is standing as he talks to Rand.  

“I’m not,” Nyota says, trying not to stare at them and mostly failing.

“Who’s that with him?”

Nyota scrolls down to the next paragraph of her paper.  “Coworker.”

“Hmmm.”

“She’s in Ops, I think.”

“Is she.”

Gaila is blessedly silent as Nyota reads the next three paragraphs of her paper, steeled both for finding a needed correction or a part of her argument she could have made better as she is for Gaila to start chatting again, ruining her focus and her ability to get this finished anytime soon.

She figures she should probably just be thankful that the silence lasts for as long as it does, because she’s interrupted from trying to decide if she needs to reword the beginning of her conclusion by Gaila saying, “Hey.”

“I’m nearly done,” Nyota says without looking up.

“Hello,” she hears and drops her stylus onto her padd, lifts her chin to see Spock standing there, backlit against the sun.

“Nyota’s working on her plan to become Rear Admiral before her five year Academy reunion,” Gaila says, leaning back on her elbows and squinting up at him.

“I am not,” Nyota immediately corrects, staring up at him too, the padd in his hand and the slight incline to his head as he looks at Gaila.  “And hi.”

“Good afternoon,” Spock says, still hovering there.

“Pull up a patch of grass, Commander, and tell us if it was your first or second week of the Academy that you started thinking about your first posting and we’ll see if you have Ny beat, since I think she began obsessing about it before she got her acceptance letter.”

“I am not worrying,” Nyota repeats as Spock looks at Gaila for a long moment before sitting with all his customary grace and ease, setting his padd on the ground next to him.  The grass curls around his boots and brushes the dark fabric of his pants and she plucks a piece of it, runs it back and forth between her fingers as she watches how he’s watching Gaila, a slight crease beginning to form between his brows.

“The position of Rear Admiral requires a minimum of seven years of service as a Captain,” he says, his voice overly careful.

“Hear that?” Gaila asks.

“You will have to be more specific,” Spock says, like they’re in class and Gaila asked a question, or like he’s explaining a fact in office hours, but they’re not in a lecture hall and they’re certainly not in his office, they’re in the sun, sitting on the grass and it’s slightly odd to see the two of them there together, Spock so still and contained and Gaila biting back a smile.

“That’s the sound of Nyota’s dreams being shattered.”

Sunlight brings out the brown in his hair as he tips his head further to the side, the corner of his eyes tightening just slightly as he stares at Gaila.

“Ignore her,” Nyota instructs.

“Ignore me?” Gaila echoes.  “Ignore Ny, she’s the one still working.”

“Which I could be done with by now if you would-“

“-Beautiful afternoon, end of the week, nothing to do-“

“-This is due.  In twenty minutes.”

“Your paper?” Spock asks and when he reaches out, she lets him pull the padd from her hand, her fingers slightly too lax to stop him, and her hand not raising on her command to grab it back, so that he turns it towards him and begins looking over it.

“It’s not done, don’t read it,” she says but still doesn’t take it back and doesn’t stop him when he does start scrolling through it.

“It’s done,” Gaila corrects.  “Ny just likes rereading her own work as a confirmation of her genius.”

“I was proofreading,” she tells Spock, who raises his eyes for a brief moment before he keeps reading, just long enough so that she can see how the sun glints off of them, highlighting those long lashes of his.

“Ny told me that you told her that she should work less,” Gaila continues.  “Well done.  She’s ignoring you obviously, but I appreciate the effort, sir.”

“I am ignoring you, Gaila,” Nyota corrects.  “It’s hard.  You talk a lot.”

“You work a lot.  Too much.  Which is hard for me, I’ll have you know.”

“I do know,” Nyota says.  “You tell me all the time.”

“Commander, can you make sure that you continue to belabor the point to Ny that not only should she spend less time in the library, but that her time in the bar with her friends should thereby increase?”

Spock looks up from the padd to study Gaila for a moment, and then his eyes meet Nyota’s and she finds herself staring back at him until he drops his attention back to her paper, his eyes moving back and forth as he reads.  “I assure you that I have found that inducing Nyota to take any action that she has not already decided upon herself is an exercise in futility.”

“I, too, have found that to be the case,” Gaila says, her tone overly serious even as her mouth curls into a smile.

“Unfair,” Nyota declares.  “Both of you.  And I already said I’d go out tonight.”

Spock looks up at her, then, a tiny flick of his eyes before he’s reading once more and she picks another piece of grass, carefully tearing it apart so that she doesn’t see if he glances at her again or if he’s still reading.

“Yes, you did,” Gaila says and Nyota can hear the smile in her voice.  “And it’s amazing.  Logical, even.”

“Unlikely,” Spock corrects.

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“I assure you, I do not.”

“What’s not logical is the fact that it’s taken weeks now to drag you out of the dorm, Ny,” Gaila continues, unabated.  “You’d think it was summer again, you being willing to set your work aside for a couple hours.”

It feels like break, very nearly.  Not as warm as it was, but sitting on the grass in the sun with classes over for the week brings back that same ease and peace of the slower schedule, with less to do over the coming days than during the workweek, and the promise of sleep.

“So, Commander,” Gaila says and Nyota can’t help but try to see if he’s bothered by the incessant chattering, but he’s still just reading, seemingly unperturbed by the amount her roommate can talk.  “Big plans of your own tonight?”

“No.”

“Why can he not have big plans and I can’t?” Nyota asks when Gaila seems satisfied with his answer.

“It’s different, Ny.”

“How?”

“Tell her, sir.”

“You two are ganging up on me,” Nyota mutters.

Gaila just laughs, her head tipped back and her curls scattered around her shoulders before jumping up to her feet.  “No, we both love you.  You have ten minutes, Ny, to turn that paper in and meet up with all of us.  Actually, Five.  Or three.”

And then she’s gone, giving them a happy wave and a bigger smile as she starts across the grass towards their dorm, leaving Nyota sitting there next to Spock, feeling the sun warm on her shoulders and listening to the chatter of cadets and bustle of the Academy around them.  She thinks she hears a bird chirp and looks for it, searching the sky and the handful of trees around the quad before returning to the task of tearing a piece of grass into progressively smaller pieces, wishing the act would somehow create enough noise to muffle the sudden and complete silence.

She makes herself stop and wipes the bits of grass from her hands, rubs them clean on her skirt and then smooths the fabric out, brushing her palms over her lap to do so in what is probably one time too many.

“You overlooked a comma in the middle of your fourteenth paragraph,” he says and she jerks her head up to look at him from where she’s started playing with the hem of her skirt, working it back and forth between her fingers in an attempt to do something with her hands, what with how they suddenly feel too empty and in need of an activity because holding them still suddenly seems too impossible what with the extra energy running through her, making her slightly shaky in its wake.

“Thanks.”

“Of course.”

He sets her padd onto the grass, right next to where she was plucking blades from, and she picks it up, settles it back into her bag and looks up again, past him, over at the trees, squinting against the sunlight to do so.

“I have to…”  She pushes her hands down her thighs once more and then tells herself to stop before she can repeat the motion again.  “I have to go turn this in.”

She half expects him to say goodbye right then and there.  What the other half of her expectation is she doesn’t know, but it wasn’t for him to fall into step with her.

“Your exam went well?” he asks as they start towards the entrance.

“It did, thank you.”

“And your paper?”

“Fine except for missing commas.”

“Only one.”

“True.”  She shifts the weight of her bag on her shoulder, and feels her arm brush against his.  She thinks about pulling back, or moving away from him as they walk, but doesn’t.  “What, uh, were you and Rand up to?”

“The Kobayashi Maru requires modifications each time it is run, as so many students repeat the test.”

“I still maintain that they’re crazy,” she tells him and feels him turn towards her, knows without looking that he’s done so.

“I am aware.”

He follows her into the quiet of the building, walking up the steps next to her as cadets stream past them and out the doors, the buzz of a Friday afternoon palpable in their voices.

“Did you have a good week?” she asks when the doors slide shut behind them, leaving them alone in the relative dimness of the front lobby, cool and darker than the bright light and warmth of outside, silence reverberating around them, broken only by the fall of their boots on the tile.  “Or two days, rather?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Lieutenant Commander Ch'Syna’s office door is open and Nyota gives her a small smile as she hands over her paper.  “Afternoon, sir.”

“Hello, Cadet,” the other woman says as she takes it, her beak clicking over the words in Standard in a way that it never does when she’s speaking her native language.  She taught Nyota a few words, which she can barely get out and really should practice again, though when she’ll get a chance to, she doesn’t know.

Ch’Syna’s feathers stand slightly as she looks up from the padd.  “Sir?”

“Lieutenant Commander,” Spock says from behind Nyota, his voice smooth and crisp like she hasn’t heard it for days now.

“Is there something I can do for you?”

There’s a pause and then Spock says, “No.”

The Lieutenant Commander taps her talons against the padd, opens her beak as if to speak and then closes it again.

It’s disconcerting.  And unsettling.  And uncomfortable and unnerving and Nyota’s absolutely certain she can feel her own heartbeat as the other woman looks at her, then at Spock again, then back at her.

“Congratulations on the success of the space trials,” she finally says and out of the corner of her eye, Nyota sees Spock nod but doesn’t turn to look, just continues to study the stack of padds sitting on the Lieutenant Commander’s desk, her classmate’s papers that must have been turned in already.  She tries to count them to see if anyone else is left to bring their padd over, if there will be other students in the hall when they leave, but the padds are too thin and too far away and it takes too much concentration, so she just keep staring at them, listening for the fall of boots outside the office.

“Commander Ho said you were back before Pike expected to be,” the other woman continues and Nyota can’t help but imagine how long they had been slated to be gone for then, if that was considered quick.

Which it was not.  It had dragged on, a lot like this conversation, which she would excuse herself from if Spock wasn’t standing in the doorway behind her, if she wasn’t caught between him and her professor in a room that suddenly feels all together slightly too small, when she’s all together overly aware that were he not here, she’d be dismissed by now.

“The auxiliary flux compensator was in need of repair.”

“I heard the new line of them are complicated to calibrate.”

“Indeed,” Spock says and the Lieutenant Commander opens her beak again, then snaps it shut without speaking, her eyes moving back and forth between them once again.

Outside, campus is already emptying out for the weekend and Nyota pauses on the steps in front of the doors and tries to shake off the prickle crawling over her skin.

It’s nice now, a breeze having picked up and the city clear of fog for once, and with the quad so empty she can imagine that it’s nearly like how it was when most of the faculty and students were gone over the summer, far more peaceful and calmer than it has been lately.  And Spock is there next to her, helping her watch the last group of cadets wander towards the mess hall, back like how it was all those weeks ago.

“What, exactly, does a flux compensator do?” she asks instead of saying goodbye to him, trying to will the sun to warm away the last of the creeping feeling that’s still clinging to her skin.

“It is linked with the antimatter transference capacitor and from there reroutes the modular photonic polarization sequencer through the forward phase actuator,” he says and when she turns to him, he’s still looking out across campus, the corners of his eyes slightly creased against the glare of the sun on them.

“Sounds important.”

“It is,” he says, and then his mouth thins and his eyes cut back towards the door behind them even though she’d really rather that he didn’t do that, since it makes that tickle skate over her skin again, makes her heart threaten to beat too fast since she’d really rather be walking further away from the building and the office there were just in, rather than focusing on it.   “I do not understand the propensity to offer congratulations to individuals when such circumstances as space trials are routine, at best.”

“Everyone’s just excited for the ship to be done.”

“Apparently.”

“And,” she says, shifting her bag on her shoulder, the weight cutting into her after a day of carrying it around.  “You’re, you know, a big shot.”

“Pardon?”

“They’re just-“ She waves back at the building, the doors that have since slid shut behind them, lifting one shoulder as she does so.  “Happy for you.  First officer and all.”

First officer of the flagship and Starfleet’s only Vulcan officer, or nearly the only one at least, so that he always sticks out, no matter where he is.  She runs her fingers under the strap of her bag again, lifts it slightly further up her shoulder.

“You should get used to it,” she tells him, her fingers still hooked around the strap.  “Everyone knowing about it, wanting to talk to you.  Especially with that party coming up.”

The line of his throat works as he swallows.

“I would prefer that was not to occur.”

“I know.”  She nods, her eyes on him until he’s looking back at her, something finally easing in his expression until it’s blank and smooth again.  He’s so close to her, standing there next to her on the top of the steps so it’s easy enough to turn slightly further away from the building behind them and reach over to nudge her elbow into his.  “So really, no plans tonight?  No precursor to a raucous weekend?”

“Pike wishes to test that flux compensator tomorrow.”

“On Saturday?” she asks, thinking of how little Olson would want to do it then, if he has to be there at all, if it isn’t just Spock and Pike going over the ship during any and all of their free time.  

“Indeed.”

“Do you work every weekend?”

“Nearly.”  He’s looking out over the quad again and she thinks about giving him a hard time about the fact that he tells her she’s too busy and too immersed in her grades and papers and quizzes, but that tightness is back around his eyes, so she doesn’t.  “You are also occupied, I presume?”

“Work, really.  Mostly.  Except for tonight apparently, because of my lovely roommate.  And, well-”  She gives him a small smile, watches how he doesn’t return it but just looks at her, his eyes tracing over her face.  “I guess I’m aiming for Rear Admiral.”

“A position I have no doubt you will achieve if that is your goal.”

She laughs a little at that, how seriously he says it and at that trace of earnestness that colors his voice.

“Have a good weekend, ok?  I have to go or Gaila will come looking for me, and nobody wants that.”

“It is advisable that you make all due haste, then.”

“Indeed,” she says, bandying the word back at him, waiting to see if he’ll smile too, when to her surprise he reaches out and touches the back of her hand, once, lightly, so that there’s a brief spark of warmth.

“Have a pleasant weekend,” he says and then his touch is gone, and then he’s gone too, walking away across the quad, his padd tucked into the small of his back and his figure cutting across the empty space.


	32. Chapter 32

“That’s what you wanted, right?” McCoy asks and she looks up from where she’s been poking at the ice in her glass with her straw.

“What?” She lets the straw go so that it circles slowly in the liquid and bobs once before settling to the bottom of the glass.

“Cardassian Sunrise?”

“Oh.  Yes.  It is.  Thank you.”

“You ok?”

“Absolutely,” she says and takes a sip to prove her point.

“After that test the other day-“

“No, I’m good, thank you.”  She pokes at the ice again, stirs it this way and then that, hopes that McCoy drops the subject.  It’s already enough to sit at a table with Kirk there, no matter that he slid the drink towards her before she could get her own, a peace offering if she ever saw one.  And no matter how much she had thought about sliding it right back, the expression on his face had brought her up short.  Gaila’s sitting there anyway, and Nyota doesn’t exactly want to start anything, not when Gaila has been looking forward to tonight all day, bouncing around the mess hall at breakfast making sure that nobody had any plans.

“You’re sure?” McCoy asks and Nyota nods, takes a second sip, and pushes any reason that McCoy might be worried about her away.  She’s here, with a drink, with her padds and bag and uniform back in her dorm, and these are, for better or for worse - worse, probably, though Kirk did go out of his way to get her her favorite drink - her friends, and the evening is just getting started.

How she can possibly be feeling that gnawing void that’s been chewing at her since she got there is beyond her.  It’ll go away.  It should at least, if she can get herself distracted enough with a conversation, with enough drinks and the promise of the club Gaila picked out for them to go to next.

“Sure,” she promises, though when the chair next to her is scraped away from the table, she’s unable to keep herself from jumping slightly.

She’s not certain who she thought it’d be that pulled it back, but it’s just Sulu, who offers her a wide smile.

“Evening,” he says, setting his beer next to her glass.

“Sulu!” Kirk half shouts, leaning across the table to smack him on the arm.  “You know Gaila?  And everyone?  That’s Masters, she was there the other day, and Bones and Uhura, and this is Chapel, she works with McCoy.”

“Hey,” Sulu says, dropping into the chair and when Nyota turns to him, he’s smiling at her again.  “How’s it going, Uhura?”

“Fine, thank you.”

It is going fine.  She has a drink in front of her, is out for the night, and received a long and happy hug from Gaila for actually showing up.  She has work to do over the weekend, but not like how it was for the last few weeks, when the idea of it felt like drowning.  A lot, but not too much, and nearly halfway through the semester that’s something to be thankful for.

She pokes at the ice in her drink again and takes a small sip of it, listening to the conversation rise up around her.

She’s watching Kirk tell some story, the way he’s laughing and has the rest of the table laughing along with him when another chair is pulled back and again she finds herself too keyed up over the motion, looking up too quickly and being too interested than is really warranted.

“Am I allowed to sit at a third year table?” Hannity asks as she holds onto the chair with one hand, a bottle of beer held in her other.

“I don’t know about that,” Kirk says, pausing midway through what he was saying to grin at her, his hands still raised mid gesture from whatever it was that he was talking about.

“Heard you fucked up your test, Kirk,” Hannity says, pointing her bottle at him.

“Heard you weren’t supposed to talk about it, Hannity.”

“I won’t get into all the ways in which you made a mess of things,” she says and sits down, pulling her chair in under her and waving her bottle towards him again.  “Last call is at 0130, it’d take too long.”

“Awww, Hannity, you’re just pissed you didn’t get a chance to join us.”

“Would’ve spared Uhura the horror of the experience,” Hannity says and gives Nyota a much gentler smile than the one the other woman has been aiming at Kirk.  “We should have made you ask Barrett anyway, rather than subject either of us to watching you crash and burn.  Is he here?”

“No,” Nyota says and stops herself from adding ‘thankfully.’

“You’re here,” Hannity says to her and that smile turns slightly playful.  “Didn’t want to stay at work late?  I’m surprised, Uhura.”

“Don’t talk about work or school or classes or homework,” Kirk instructs, his palms laid flat on the table and giving Hannity and Nyota both a hard look.  “We’re enjoying ourselves.”

“You’re enjoying yourself,” Hannity corrects.  “I’m enjoying remembering everything I heard about you from Tuesday.  And I’m just surprised Uhura didn’t want to spend some extra time in the office, is all.” 

“We finally got her out of the xenoling building,” Gaila says, adjusting the cocktail umbrellas she has shoved into the top of her glass, nearly not enough room left between them for her straw to poke through.  “Don’t give her ideas about going back there tonight.”

“Let’s keep talking about how Kirk blew the sim,” Nyota suggests when Hannity smiles again, right at her, her eyes dancing as she takes another sip of her beer.

“Let’s not,” Kirk says.

“I can also think of more interesting topics,” Hannity says and Nyota goes back to stirring the ice in her glass so that she doesn’t have to know whether or not the other woman is still smiling at her like that.

“Like maybe things Uhura didn’t do perfectly the first time,” Kirk suggests and Nyota would care, but she’d probably have to look up to say something about it.  Instead, she takes a long sip of her drink, sweet and tangy and really, really not strong enough.

“Not what I was thinking of,” Hannity says.

“Our xenobiology course last year?”  Kirk says.  “She hated it.  Got an A minus, I think.”

“I did not,” Nyota says and does look up this time, right at Kirk who’s grinning at her like how Hannity still is.  She takes another long sip of her drink.  “I did fine, thank you.”

“Oh, xenobio?” Hannity asks and Nyota tries to answer but she has to swallow and lower her glass, all of which seems to take too long so that by the time she’s able to say anything, Hannity has added, “Uhura knows all about that.”

“That’s not-“

“-I thought you didn’t like that class,” Gaila says and Nyota tries to cut in again, tries to ward off the way Gaila’s suddenly paying too much attention and how Hannity is very clearly fighting a losing battle at not smiling wider.

“I think it’s more of an extracurricular interest,” Hannity says before Nyota can stop her and has to sit there and watch, her hand tight around the sweating, wet curve of her glass as Gaila stares at Hannity for a moment before a smile pulls at her lips and broadens into a laugh that is loud enough to cut through the conversation, so that everyone’s looking at them.

“Wait till next semester,” McCoy says, either missing or ignoring how Gaila is laughing like that and Nyota watches him as he speaks and as he eyes Gaila, so that she doesn’t have to take in how her roommate’s shoulders are still shaking, something she really, really doesn’t want to look over and see anymore than she has to out of the corner of her eye, nor how Hannity is still grinning right at her in a way that makes a creeping flush of heat crawl up her neck.  “Everyone hates Xenomedical Research Design.  I heard it’s- Sir.”

He half rises from his chair, looking up, over Nyota’s head and she begins to turn as well when she feels two shockingly cool hands on her shoulders, a welcome distraction from how Gaila seems to be gearing up for another comment, what with how the table falls quiet.

“Sir,” Chapel echoes, her drink out of her hand and back on the table in front of her fast enough that Nyota’s half surprised the glass doesn’t break.

“Parties normally get better when I show up, Cadets,” Puri says from above her, his hands still resting on her shoulders.  “And what were you saying about that class?”

“Nothing, sir,” McCoy says.

“Didn’t sound like nothing.  Are you giving Uhura nightmares about next semester?”

“No, sir.”

He leans around her to look her in the eye, smiles down at her.  “Are they giving you a hard time?”

“Nope,” she says, realizing just how long it’s been since she saw him, that easy way he has about himself and how happy he always seems, the fact of him standing there loosening her up until she returns his smile with one of her own.  “Hi.”

“Hello to you too.”  Puri scrapes a chair across the floor, dragging it over from another table to between Nyota and Sulu and sitting so that Sulu has to move his chair slightly to the side to make room.  He looks around at everyone in turn, everyone who is still quiet and just watching him.  “You’re Jim Kirk.” 

“Hey,” Kirk says with a small quirk of his mouth, something approximating a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and he’s quiet again until Gaila suddenly leans forward and waves at Puri.

“Teal, right?” she asks.

“I need a drink for this.  Anyone else?  It’s on me, Xenomed Research is the worst class at this place.  Don’t tell any of the deans.”

“Stoyer,” Kirk says, his eyes flicking towards Puri and then away again, out across the bar.

“Yeah her, especially.”

“That’s- shit,” Kirk says, ducking his head down.  “Stoyer.”

“Shit,” Puri echoes, grinning at the top of Kirk’s head.  “No.  Not Stoyer.  Anyone but Stoyer.  She’s no fun at all.”

“I am lots of fun,” Stoyer corrects when she reaches them through the crowd, winding through the mass of people standing between their table and the bar and coming to stand next to Puri, her hand finding the back of his chair.  “What are you doing to these poor cadets?”

“We’re reliving our Academy days,” Puri tells her.  “The dean needs your chair, Cadet.”

“Stop torturing them,” Stoyer says, but sits when Sulu quickly stands up.  She leans behind Puri and Nyota lets herself lean back too, away from where Puri has his forearms on the table, already talking to Chapel and McCoy again.  “Sorry about showing up, I know it’s no fun with us here.”

“Not at all,” Nyota assures her when Stoyer gives her a slight grimace, then aims it at the back of Puri’s head.

“How’s your night?  Better before we crashed it?”

“Better since then,” Nyota says.

“Your semester looking up at all?”

“Yes,” Nyota answers, not wanting to think too hard about the shock of the beginning of it, that last time she ran into Stoyer on the quad that day and how sickening the crush of classes and work had been.

“I’m getting drinks, it’ll be better still,” Puri says.  

“So,” Stoyer begins, smiling around the table in Puri’s absence, seeming happy to take up where he left off.  “You all get your homework finished?”

“Haven’t started,” Gaila says happily.  “We’re going out tonight.  Dancing.”

“Out,” Stoyer repeats.  “I remember going out, when ‘out’ was somewhere after the first bar, instead of being only the first bar.”

“They’re going dancing,” she tells Puri when he gets back, a half dozen drinks balanced precariously in his hands, so that Stoyer has to grab them from them and carefully set them down.

“They need more work, if they have time for that,” he says, pushing one towards McCoy.

“You never take me dancing.”

“You’re right, we should join them.”

“We should,” Stoyer says, but when the drinks are empty and Puri’s shared not one but two different stories about McCoy and a particularly stubborn Tellarite patient, and they all get up to leave, Stoyer sips her drink and tells them to have fun.

“Not too much fun,” Puri calls after them, his hand catching Nyota’s arm and keeping her in her seat another moment, so that she stays there while Gaila gives her a questioning look.

“We’ll give her back soon,” Puri promises and Gaila looks at her again before following everyone else out, their chairs haphazardly pushed back in and their now empty glasses left scattered over the table.

He waits until they’ve all gone and the bar is comparatively quieter before he leans closer to her, his drink cradled between his hands.

“Listen, I heard you did great the other day on that sim.  That test is terrible, I think Spock is secretly some kind of evil genius and he just hides it under all the logic so that we never find out.  I promise that there is nothing better about graduating than not having the Academy throw things like that at you.  The Academy is terrible too, by the way.  Don’t tell Arlene I said that, please.”

Stoyer leans around Puri, her mouth stretched thin and her hand coming to rest on Puri’s shoulder, near to where Nyota is.  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, really,” Nyota says, feeling Puri squeeze her forearm again before letting go.  The twist in her stomach that the memory of the test brings up has been eased by the intervening days, and probably also by the drink she’s nearly finished, and it’s fine as long as she doesn’t think about getting her marks back, the way that filmplast looked as she held it, or remember sitting on the edge of Spock’s bed as she read her assessment, listening to his even breathing as she scrolled through it, her stomach pitching the farther down she got.  Her stomach doesn’t do that anymore as much, and the farther away from the test she gets as the days slip by, the better.  “But thank you.”

“We don’t want to keep you here,” Puri says.  “We’re old and boring.”

“We are,” Stoyer confirms.

“Really old.  I was a cadet back before they forced everyone into that damn test, and Arlene was one back before warp drives had been invented.”

Nyota can half hear Spock saying that wouldn’t be possible, due to the fact that First Contact would not have then occurred to spur such historic events as the founding of the Federation, let alone Starfleet, and that moreover, Stoyer is hardly that old.  He’s not there, though, so she’ll just have to remember to tell him about the missed opportunity, whenever it is that she sees him next.  On Monday, maybe, or not until Tuesday when he’s back in the office if he doesn’t stop by earlier.  He might not.  He’s busy too, no matter what he says about her schedule and work habits.

“If you do want to stick around with us,” Puri continues and she pushes back that empty feeling that’s plagued her all night so that she can focus on him.  “We can offer you another drink in exchange for the fact that your boyfriend put you through the ringer.  Well, technically it was the machinations of my wife, but I have to go home with her tonight.”

“You already called me old, dear,” Stoyer says as Nyota pokes at the melting ice her glass, doesn’t look up at them right away.

“Drink up,” he instructs, pushing her glass closer to her.  “Uhura?”

“That’s not-“  Accurate or correct, she tries to say.  Factual.  True.  What really happened, precisely because specific definitions and the importance of semantics can’t and shouldn’t be underestimated.  And not what she necessarily wants either, because she’s supposed to be halfway down the block by now, or piling into a taxi with too many people, except that the idea of catching up with the rest of her friends seems altogether too much with how quiet - quieter at least - it is with them gone, and she was happy enough to come here tonight but going out again now seems like a lot more effort, especially since she’d have to call Gaila to find out where exactly it is that she should meet them, and maybe this is better, another drink here and then she can go back to her dorm and sleep, the end of the week dragging on her as much as the thought of going out into the night with her friends does.  “Necessary,” she finishes, flicking her comm open to see if she has a text from Gaila before closing it again when one doesn’t appear.  Gaila will be in touch later, or not.  It wouldn’t be the first time Nyota slipped back to the dorm by herself.  “I can get one myself.”

“No, nice try, Spock’s been turning down drinks from me for years now, this is my chance,” Puri says, standing and shoving his chair in, already halfway to the bar.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Nyota says.

“By proxy,” he calls back.

“Wait till he’s had a few more, he gets even more fun,” Stoyer says.  She slides out of her chair and into one across the table, where Chapel had been sitting only minutes ago, and pushes the empty glasses to the side so that they’re all gathered together at the far edge of the table.

When Puri gets back, Nyota cuts herself off from telling Stoyer about her Orthography class and instead watches the way Puri tosses his comm next to hers on the table, and sits next to his wife with a heavy sigh.  “Called Spock, he didn’t answer.”

“I think he had work to do,” Nyota offers.

“We all have work, I have work, you have work, Arlene has so much work she gets four or five assistants-“

“-One-“

“-So Spock can also not work.  Can I just borrow…” Puri says, then snags Nyota’s comm from where it’s still sitting in front of her, flips it open and brings up her most recent contacts and taps at Spock’s ID.  “Near the top, so convenient, thanks Uhura.”

Nyota stares at her comm in his hand, then up at him.  “You-“

“-He’s terrible,” Stoyer confirms.  

“Look at that,” Puri grins, dropping the comm into Nyota’s hand when the screen lights up to indicate the call has been accepted.

“Nyota?” she hears, slightly too quiet for the noise of the bar and she turns away from how Puri’s still smiling and Stoyer’s shaking her head at him, and all those glasses sitting there, leaving pools of moisture under them.

“Hi, sorry, I-“ She stands, pushes her chair in and tries to find a way through the crowd and towards the door, but people seem to move into her way as soon as a path clears so that it takes longer than it feels like it needs to and she’s left winding through the crush, cradling her comm close to her as she goes.  “Hold on.”

The cooler night air hits her cheeks and the noise falls quiet as the door slides shut behind her, leaving her thinking that she hadn’t realized exactly how loud and cramped and busy it was in there until now that she’s outside.

“Sorry, that was loud,” she says, taking another couple steps away from the door.

“I can assume then, that you are not in the library.”

“I’m out.  At a bar.  Still.  Moe’s.  Gaila and all of them left but Puri’s here.”

“He is?”

“Kirk could only stay for about five minutes with Stoyer sitting at the table,” she tells him.  “You missed the whole thing.  Plus I’m not working, so you’ll just have to take my word for it about all the fun I’m having, since you can’t see with your own eyes the sight of me doing something other than my reading.”

“I can, however, hear it.”

“True.”

“I do not know whether you have not returned to your school work or the fact that you took my advice is more unexpected.”

“You know, I think some of these bars have comedy nights if you want to take a crack at making your act public.”

“Interesting.”

“Not fascinating?”

“No.”

She scrapes her shoe over the sidewalk, casting a quick glance behind her through the window to see Stoyer laughing at something Puri must have just said, their images hazy and distorted through the glass, and other patrons continuously walking in front of them, so that Nyota can only see them intermittently.  

“Puri called you, actually.”

“I am aware.”

“No, I meant…”  She raises her hand to grip the back of her neck, turns and looks through the window again.  She has to wait for a Tellarite to move so that she can see Stoyer and Puri once more, now with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair, then says all in a rush, the words tumbling out of her and the thought that he’s not there with them welling up through her chest, hot and thick,  “You should join us.  If you want.”

“At Moe’s?” he asks and the name sounds strange in his voice, odd after the number of times she’s heard it bandied back and forth by McCoy and Kirk and Gaila, a half dozen of her other friends.  She wonders if they’ll wander back to the same bar later tonight and what that possibly might be like, if Spock comes and he and Kirk and McCoy are in the same place, two completely different parts of her life colliding.

“You’re busy, I know,” she says quickly, since Spock’s not coming so it’s not worth even thinking about, all of them being there together.  “And I don’t know how long they’re planning to stay, but…”

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t say anything at all so that she’s left with her comm in her hand, alone on the sidewalk as groups of people and a handful of couples walk past her, and traffic flows up and down the street, interrupted here and there by pedestrians jogging across, ignoring crosswalks in favor of breaks between cars.

“It’s not your thing,” she tells him, since she’s not sure why she even asked when he was never going to come, or what she thought he would say besides the silence she’s listening to. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I am at the gym,” he says and she has to reorient the image she has of him alone in his apartment, sitting at his desk maybe, or on his couch even though it’s hard to picture him relaxing on it, to one of him working out.  He runs, she knows, and he must do something else too for that lean frame he has, all long lines and graceful muscles.

She stares off down the street as the cars zip past and a loud shout of laughter rises up from down the block.  “What a thrilling Friday night.”

“It is no such thing.”

“Well, forget it anyway.  Regardless, I mean.  Have fun at the gym.”

“If you presume the gymnasium so enjoyable, you too should consider it a suitable venue for your evening.”

“I’ll stick with alcohol and prying stories about you at the Academy out of Puri, thank you.”

“I do not believe much effort at all will be required to convince him to share.”

“Good to know,” she says and thinks about asking him to come again, thinks about trying to convince him, but maybe that’s why he didn’t answer when Puri called, and anyway he’s about to be busy all weekend and this might be his only chance to have any personal time between teaching and his duties to the Enterprise.  So she really shouldn’t be holding him up like this.  He’s at the gym and likely filling the rest of his evening in other ways, however it is that he’s chosen to spend his Friday that doesn’t include trekking out to a bar.  And it’s not like she’s going to stay that long to begin with, since the idea of getting into her bed seems better and better the longer she stands there on the sidewalk, so she should really be letting him go.  “Look, have a great night.  I’ll talk to you later.”

Later is in the office.  Which is fine. 

She’s nearly surprised by the click of her comm folding shut, unsure of when she had decided to do that.

She’ll mention it to him when she sees him next, let him tease her in that way of his for hanging up without saying goodbye, and hope that his office door isn’t open, or that they’re alone in the break room when it comes up.  Or she’ll bring it up over lunch, maybe.  Like they used to always have together over the summer, though now the mess hall is always packed with students and officers and it’s hardly the empty, cavernous space that it was, empty except for the two of them and the table they always chose, which has since been taken over by a group of first years.

“Any luck?” Puri asks as she pulls out her chair.

“He’s at the gym.”

“Of course he is.”

“And he said earlier that he has to work this weekend anyway.”

“Of course he does.  Pike’s nearly as tough as Arlene.”

“He is not,” Stoyer corrects.  “And Puri’s sorry for stealing your comm.”

“I am not,” Puri says, giving Nyota a wide smile.  “I nearly took Spock’s away too, while we were gone.  Wouldn’t let the damn thing out of his sight.  Thought he was going to tape it to his station on the bridge.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Sickbay?” Stoyer asks.

“Space,” Puri says, leaning across the table towards Nyota.  “Is really boring.  Especially in Sickbay.  Unless certain half-Vulcans are pouring coolant all over themselves.”

“That happened at Spacedock,” Nyota points out.

“Which is in space, listen to you, sounds like you spend too much time with that Commander of ours with that kind of specificity or whatever he’d call it.”

“Well,” Nyota says, raises her drink and takes a sip, watching the ice spin slowly in the glass as she lowers it again.  “Not tonight, I guess.”

And not really in general, either, the hours they spent in each other’s company over the summer tempered by his absence and now the semester so that even though the quiet and distance that stretched between them in the days right after he got back has dissipated, she still didn’t run into him after leaving his apartment and walking to campus together, and didn’t see him the day after that, and then not at all until on the quad only hours ago now, and won’t see him until next week.

“So I told Spock that you were going to tell me all about him at the Academy,” she says, working her straw back and forth between her fingers and then poking at an ice cube that is sticking up above the rest.  “Since he’s not here.”

“Payback,” Stoyer says.  “I like it.”

“Perfect.  Yes.  What do you want to know?” Puri says, setting his own glass down on the table without taking the drink he had raised it for and leaning towards her, his antennae sticking straight up and his smile white against his blue skin.  “About the spiders?  No, no, how about during third year - or, wait, how about during finals, that time in the library?  See, this is why Spock should come.  Or shouldn’t have opened that terrarium at the very least.”

“I do not want to know what you two did in the library,” Stoyer says.  

“The spiders, then,” Puri says.

“I don’t really like spiders,” Nyota confesses.

“Guess who doesn’t either,” Puri says and Nyota takes a sip of her drink, settling in to listen, half of her mind still on the thought of Spock somewhere on campus, just not with them right now, even as Puri beings to speak about him, his eyes bright and already smiling.

It’s later, when the empty glasses have been cleared away and another group has taken two unused chairs from their table, and when Nyota’s on her second drink and Puri’s far past his second story, when she’s half lost track of time and the fact that she’s not supposed to be there at all but out with Gaila and the rest of them, not sitting at the same table still with Stoyer laughing into her drink as Puri talks that he suddenly cuts himself off, his eyes and antenna raising to stare towards the door.

“What?” Nyota asks, turning in her chair, but a Trill standing behind her is blocking her view of the rest of the room.

“Amazing,” Puri breathes, then smiles, his teeth white against his blue skin and reaches out to grip her hand, giving her a firm, quick squeeze, before he stands up and walks into the crowd.

“You’re in a bar!” she hears Puri say, loud enough that it carries over the noise of the room and Nyota shoves her chair back from the table so that she can see Spock standing there, can see Puri grabbing his shoulder, smiling like this isn’t the strangest thing to happen tonight, far odder than watching a dean sit at a table full of her classmates, Spock being there so still and composed among the crowd and noise of the room.

“I am at a bar,” Spock corrects, that even tenor of his voice cutting through the crowd, his eyes sliding towards her and making her aware of how she’s staring at him.  She tells herself to look away but doesn’t, unable to quite take all of him in, against all odds standing a few feet from her.

“Atta boy,” Puri says.  “What do you want?  Anything?  I’ll get you something.  No, don’t say no, I’m not going to listen if you say no.  Uhura, you too?  Arlene?”

“I’m ok,” Nyota says, her half finished drink still sitting on the table in front of her, her hand still curled around it like how it was a moment ago when it was just her and Puri and Stoyer.  It’s just Stoyer now, Puri disappearing towards the bar and then the chair next to her is being pulled out and Spock is sitting in it, like they could be in the mess hall or the student union or that cafe they haven’t gone back to together, but they’re not, they’re in - at - a bar and her stomach is doing a funny little flip at the sight of him there next to her, not in a uniform and not in his office or anywhere near campus for the first time in weeks now, but at a table with Stoyer on the other side of it and Puri’s chair still half pushed back.

“Well I never,” Stoyer says while Nyota shifts in her seat, adjusts how her glass is sitting on the table, runs her hand over her lap and brushes wrinkles out of her skirt that aren’t there.

“You have never?” Spock prompts and his chair is close to hers, closer than if they were on campus or anywhere but at a small table in a bar, but they’re not, they’re sitting right there and he’s right next to her and his shoulder keeps brushing against hers in what is not an accident on her part and she doesn’t think is one on his, either.

Her hand tingles with the memory of his touch from only hours earlier and she rubs her thumb over the back of it, tucks her hands down into her lap before reaching for her drink again, sipping it, and placing it back down on the ring it had left, right on the same spot it was earlier.  Her elbow bumps into Spock’s as she does so and she leaves it there, warm against his arm.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Stoyer says.  “Though precedent is a tricky thing, you showing up like this.  Puri might leverage this for all it’s worth.”

“I am aware of that fact and gave it the consideration it was due.”  His arm is definitely leaning more firmly against hers now and it’s making her feel slightly unfocused.  Or the drink is, rather.  Maybe.  Probably.  She takes a deep breath, trying to get that humming, buzzing feeling to recede.

“What is that?” he asks, peering into her glass and she thinks of him at a computer terminal asking about a translation she did, or in his office wanting clarification of a student’s answer on a quiz she was grading, or on the quad with the sun shining down, his hand reaching for her paper and her letting him take it.

“Here,” she says and slides it towards him, a wet trail left behind on the table.

“That is not an answer,” he tells her but tries it anyway, doesn’t say no or that he doesn’t want to, doesn’t hesitate about it, just takes a tiny sip, his fingers leaving sweaty marks on the glass.  He wipes the moisture onto his pant legs the moment he puts it back down, his brow slightly furrowed in answer to the taste.

“So Puri told us some interesting stories,” Stoyer says, eyeing Spock over the rim of her glass as she raises it to take a long sip.

“Did he.”

“He did,” Stoyer confirms.

“Interesting is one word,” Nyota adds.  His hand is resting right there on the table and she doesn’t stop herself from tapping her finger against his knuckle, her hand warming at the contact as she thinks of a different day, the hot haze of the desert and the beating sun and prying bits of his past out of him over a different table, a different time and place than here.  “I should have known.  Deviant, Spock, really.”

“You,” Stoyer says, her forearms on the table and both hands wrapped around her glass, smiling at Spock.  Nyota’s smiling at him too, wonders when she started doing that.  “Were you responsible for the lockdown in the bio labs during your second year?”

“Strictly speaking-“

“-Strictly speaking, he was completely and utterly responsible,” Puri says, dropping a drink in front of Spock and once he’s sat back down, slinging his arm around his wife’s shoulders.

“You did not have to share that particular story,” Spock tells him, which only makes Puri laugh.

“I also told them the one about Lieutenant Strathern.  That was a good one too, if you ask me.”

“You will notice that nobody did.”

“There was so much smoke,” Puri says to Nyota.  “In the labs.  Not coming from the poor Lieutenant, thankfully.  You should have seen it, these bright blue clouds that were everywhere.  And the officers.  Panicked, completely panicked, they were running all over the place.”

“I was one of those officers,” Stoyer adds.  “And we were not panicked.  Concerned with student safety is all.”

“Safety was not an issue,” Spock says and Nyota’s still smiling, or smiling again, maybe.  “And I do not believe that Puri has sufficiently divulged his own involvement.”

“Which was infinitesimal.”

“Significant, rather.”

“Miniscule.”

“Overly consequential.”

“Lilliputian.”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t tell him what it means,” Puri says to Nyota.

“It’s-“ she starts, turning to Spock anyway, but stops because there’s someone behind him and when she looks up, she pulls her hand back from his forearm, though she can’t remember when she put it there.

“Thought that was you,” Lieutenant Cretek is saying to him, and she’s smiling too, right at Spock whose arm is still against Nyota’s, who’s sitting right next to her as Cretek talks to him.  Cretek, who Nyota just saw the other day in class, whose exam she just took, who she knows as her Cardassian instructor and not someone who should be here right now because she should be behind a lectern or in her office, certainly not looking down at Spock and absolutely not putting her hand on the chair next to his, so easy and casual like that.  “Engstrom and Ho are here too and - Uhura.”

“Hi,” Nyota gets out as Cretek’s eyes flick back and forth between her and Spock.  She wraps her hands around her glass, watches the straw bobbing against the side of it and tries to decide if she shouldn’t be holding on to it in front of one of her professors, tries to not shift away from Spock, and tries, desperately, to not focus on how it feels to have Cretek staring at her.

“Cadet,” Cretek says and Nyota nods back, tries to get out a crisp ‘sir’ like McCoy and Chapel both managed, but it doesn’t come.

She’s still trying when Ho is suddenly there and Stoyer is standing to hug her, leaning across the table to do so, and when Engstrom joins them too, giving Nyota much the same look that Cretek did in a way that makes her stare down into her drink so that she doesn’t have to look at the other woman just then, can just watch the way the ice slowly spins and how a drop of condensation slides down the glass to pool on the table.

“I didn’t know you all were coming,” Stoyer says, pulling her chair to the side to make room for Ho next to her.  Nyota didn’t know Stoyer was coming either, or Puri and certainly not Spock, not when she left her dorm after dropping off her bag and changing out of her uniform to join Gaila and the rest of them.  Sulu dropping into a chair was reasonable enough, and Hannity pulling one over too - Hannity, who did research for Ho last spring and used to talk about it in the break room of the Xenolinguistics Building, and who was in Engstrom’s class with Nyota last year, and they used to wait for her to be free during her office hours, standing together in the hall just a few feet from Spock’s door as they talked about the readings and the paper topics.  And who traded smiles with Gaila in a way that makes Nyota’s skin still prickle at the memory, that flush of heat that has started again with Cretek still looking at her like that.

“Well, we’re giving up next Friday for Spock and Puri’s big party, so we thought we’d make the most of tonight,” Ho says, giving Nyota a wide smile as she sits.  Nyota focuses on that, not on Engstrom pulling a chair up next to Puri and certainly not on Cretek who has sat in that chair next to Spock.  “Hi, Uhura, how are you?”

“Fine, thank you,” she says, thinks of the coolness of the night air outside, how easy it would be to make her excuses and leave, to even reach over and snag Spock’s sleeve in her fingers or curl her hand over his wrist and tug him towards the door so that they could both be out of there and he wouldn’t be sitting there, so close to her and so quiet, that stiffness around him that she recognizes all too well, and the silence that accompanies it.

She has a nearly full drink sitting in front of her and he hasn’t finished his own.  She imagines the feeling of their eyes on her back if she were to walk away.  She stays where she is, rooted in the same chair she sat down in all that time ago, when she had first gotten there and Gaila had waved at her across the table and Kirk had immediately slid her drink towards her.  They’re all gone now, off somewhere that officers likely aren’t appearing out of the crowd, dressed in civilian clothes and not instructors blacks, and staring at her.

“It is not our party,” Puri corrects.  “And we are not looking forward to it.  Pike dragged us out over the summer too, to dinner.”

“And Mojave,” Stoyer adds.

“But that was fun.  McKenna and Olson drank their way through the three cases of beer Pike brought and Uhura beat everyone at Scrabble.”

“You went to that, Spock?” Cretek asks.

“I didn’t know you two joined everyone,” Ho says to Nyota and she meets the Commander’s eyes and nods, trying for an easy smile to accompany it because she likes Ho, has always liked her and talking to her is generally nice and pleasant, no matter that it happens in Academy hallways and offices and not over the crush of sound at a bar.  “It was fun?”

“It was-“ she starts, but her words get caught on confirming that it was fun, or that it was interesting at least, because she still doesn’t know what it was, all this time later.

“Fun?” Puri cuts in.  “Poor Hawkins spent all of space trials with his nose buried in a dictionary, I think it’s safe to say that Uhura had plenty of fun.”

“I had him in class my first semester teaching,” Engstrom says.  “I thought I couldn’t explain subjunctive clauses for shit, but it turns out it was him.  Still can’t believe Pike wanted him so badly, he barely passed his language requirements.”

“You should see him decipher encryptions.  Did it faster than the computer did,” Ho says.  “And Pike was standing there the day that Hawkins updated the long range sensor relay stations, I thought he was going to haul Hawkins out to Riverside without letting him finish he’s so good at it, right Spock?”

In the moment before Spock says anything, a moment that takes too long and seems to hang heavy in the air as everyone turns to him, Nyota considers nudging him or shifting her foot against his under the table to get his attention and draw it back to the conversation, but then he’s nodding once, a short, abrupt motion, and saying, “That is accurate.”

“Well I maintain he’s terrible at language acquisition,” Engstrom says, leaning back in her chair as everyone’s attention slides off of Spock again so that he’s left there being as quiet as he was, his elbow still resting against Nyota’s and when she looks over at him, his focus is on the drink in front of him instead on anyone else around the table.  “Guess he still is, apparently.”

“Pike relies on universal translators too much anyway,” Ho says.  “Doesn’t give us enough credit.  Not that I have anything against Hawkins, nice guy and all.  Just ask Amano.”

“No,” Engstrom says, moving forward again, her elbows coming to rest on the table as she leans towards Ho, her mouth slightly open in the beginning of a smile.  “Really?”

“They went out to dinner last week.  Heard Amano telling Irani all about it.  Not that I said that, of course.”

“Of course,” Engstrom says, easy as that, as if they’re not all sitting there talking about Nyota’s professors, instructors in the department that she sees in the halls, the turbo lifts, has received grades from and taken notes during their lectures.  “I hope they come together next week.  Amano deserves it after what happened with Wakeman.”

“Wakeman,” Stoyer echoes, her head shaking back and forth as she reaches for her drink.  “We are not talking about Wakeman tonight, it’s my Friday.”

“Good story, then?” Ho asks and the question, and casual as it is, it leaves Nyota feeling unmoored and loose, floating free of the conversation and only tethered there by the cool slick of her glass against her palm, the still and solid presence of Spock in the chair next to her.

“That faculty meeting last week?  He’s the one who suggested- No.  No, no, no, we’re not doing this.”

“Know what we are doing, though?” Puri asks.  “Wondering why Hawkins didn’t get together with this Amano any earlier.  They could have joined us being harassed by a very overeager foreign dignitary for the entire summer.”

“Also Wakeman’s fault, then,” Ho says.  “Maybe we can blame him for the fact that Pike’s dragging us to this party next week, too.  You didn’t let them have it on campus, did you Arlene?”

“It’s at HQ.  Thank God,” Stoyer says, both hands held up in front of her as she shakes her head again.  “And Chris is none too pleased about it happening at all.  You should have heard him go on about it the other day.”

Puri nods in agreement, setting his drink back on the table and squeezing his wife’s shoulder in one blue hand.  “He tried to talk the Admirals out of it.  I thought Spock was going to back him up with a presentation on why it’s a useless event, and if he didn’t the rest of us would have, but Barnett insisted.  Highlighting new construction and Spacedock’s efficiency, I guess, though that probably means we’re not supposed to talk about that flux capacitor.”

“Compensator,” Spock corrects but it’s so quiet that Nyota thinks she’s the only one who hears it, his voice not cutting through the crush of noise and not drawing anyone’s attention.

“You going Uhura?” Ho asks and Nyota has to pull her attention back from how Captain Pike’s first name sounds, so casually thrown out like that and how Spock still hasn’t looked up from the glass Puri put in front of him.  “Or did you think of pretty much anything you could be doing that’d be more fun?”

Cretek laughs and grins as she sips at her drink.  “You should see the midterm I have waiting for her class next week.”

“Don’t give her a heart attack,” Ho says, pointing one finger at Cretek as she raises her glass.  “It’s the weekend.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” Nyota cuts in, because she is, and because she really, really doesn’t want to think about Cretek’s midterm, not with how her most recent test for the class was, only two days ago now and all too fresh in her mind, handing her padd into Cretek at the end of the hour and never then imagining that she’d see Cretek cradling a drink in a bar, not when she was already grading the first of the padds in front of her.

“I didn’t think cadets were invited,” Cretek continues and Nyota feels herself bristle slightly, nettled even though she tells herself not to be.

It’s fine.  It’s not as if cadets were specifically invited and it’s not as if she’s not a cadet.  The only cadet who’s here currently, unless there’s another group of students in the bar that she hasn’t noticed, and she thinks she can live without looking around to see if that’s the case, unsure of what exactly she would do if she recognized them.

“Cadets have the good sense to not get stuck at terrible parties,” Stoyer says as she turns to Puri and pins him with a look.  “You never came to anything with me.”

“Spock and I were busy hitting the town,” Puri says easily, shooting a smile at Spock, one which is not returned because Spock is still studying his drink, an idea that Nyota finds better than looking up again, lest she find Cretek watching her once more.  

“You were not,” Cretek says.  “You two had your lights out at 2100 every night.”

“No, that’s not true at all, Spock was up until 0200 reading on his damn padd,” Puri corrects.  “Probably still does it.”

“It’s ok to say that you miss him, dear, now that you two are back home and aren’t driving the rest of the crew up the wall with your exclusive club for two,” Stoyer says.

Puri laughs, which turns into a smile that is a bit too impish for Nyota’s taste as he looks at her, the glass in his hand waving towards her.  “It’s fine, I don’t have to deal with that damn creepy light that padds make in the dark anymore, that’s all on Uhura now.”

“Cretek’s right that you go to bed as early as my grandmother does,” Stoyer says immediately, thankfully because then Nyota doesn’t have to think too hard about what Puri just said, can take a drink from her glass and try to ignore everything that he just implied in front of her professors and the head of her department.

Stoyer’s comment makes Puri tighten his arm around her shoulders and pull her into him, leaning down to whisper something to her that makes her laugh and half pull away, her hand smacking at his chest. Nyota wants to look away, a moment that’s too easy between them and simple, like something she shouldn’t be watching, but all that there is to focus on without meeting Cretek’s eyes, who’s looking right at her again, or staring at her drink, which has been overly deserving of her attention, is Ho, who is giving her a soft smile.

“How was the test?” Ho asks and to Nyota’s surprise, the other woman reaches over and gives her a friendly squeeze on the arm.  “Seems like you survived.”

It takes Nyota a moment to nod, the weight of Ho’s hand too distracting, too friendly and unreserved, so that it’s not until Ho has pulled back from her that she gets out, “Yes, thank you.”

She wants to rub her hand over where Ho had touched like she can make sense of it, when during her first year Ho had to tell her to keep the noise down in the halls, where she was standing outside a classroom and laughing about something, some long forgotten joke with her classmates.  

Beneath the table, she feels Spock’s knee press against her own in a way that could be a mistake with anyone else, but it’s Spock so it’s not.   She pushes back, the pressure steadying and lets their legs rest together like that as the conversation rises up around them, leaving her mostly thinking about how warm her knee is, and then his hand is on it too, when it comes to rest there, his thumb rubbing back and forth as the other officers talk and he sits there silently next to her.

Later, on the sidewalk, she feels a little buzzed as she tries to find Puri and thank him since she never ended up paying for any of the drinks put in front of her, but in the crowd of people walking by, the other officers talking to each other as they zip up their jackets, and a group of Tellarites trying to get into the bar past them, she loses sight of him.

Spock is still there though, slightly behind her so that she can feel him over her shoulder, overly still and not moving.  She’s not moving either, not as the door slides shut behind the Tellarites and not as the rest of the officers start to walk away, and she finds it’s easier to stay where she is, and easier to not focus on how Cretek looks back at them, knocks her elbow into Engstrom’s, and better still to not imagine any possibility of what they might be saying to each other right then.

“When did you have time to blow up the botany labs if you were so busy unleashing spiders in the biology wing?” she asks and instead of watching how Cretek half turns towards them again, Nyota blinks at the street and the pedestrians walking past and what must be Puri and Stoyer’s car pulling away from the curb.

“I was not responsible for any detonations of which Puri may have spoken,” he says and she turns to look up at him now that he’s talking again, even though he’s staring over her head, off into some distance that she’s sure that even if she tried to turn around and look, she wouldn’t find.  She doesn’t turn, just watches him until his eyes come down to meet hers.

“Not an answer,” she points out, tension she didn’t know was there, held in the creases of the corner of his eyes slowly easing as he looks at her.  

She tries to stop herself from talking, then, to leave it alone and let the comments from the bar stay back there, and the fact that the other officers leave with them as they walk ahead of them up the sidewalk, but maybe it was one drink too many or maybe the thought of Spock as a student like she is stirs something in her, when now he’s constantly in his uniform, teaching and grading and answering his students’ questions. 

“I didn’t realize that Cretek lived on your hall when you were at the Academy.”

“She did.”

“Apparently.”

Cretek who knew him as a cadet and who is also Nyota’s Cardassian professor, which he knew, of course.  The entire semester, he knew that ever since she told she was taking that class.

It’s fine.  Cretek is on her way back to campus.  And it’s really, really fine.

“Are you going to find your roommate and other companions?” he asks and she has to stop telling herself how fine she is with that in order to come up with an answer.

She stares up the block at the retreating backs of the officers, all those professors from her department that she never even began to think about in terms of having Friday nights, let alone how they might spend them.

“Maybe,” she says, watching them laugh, the noise very nearly traveling back down the block to where she’s standing with Spock.  It’s late, though, and she doesn’t know exactly how long they stayed at the bar after Gaila and all of them left, but Puri got her another drink and Stoyer had two, and Ho had had enough that she was waving away Puri’s offer of another one, and they hadn’t exactly been rushing through them, so Nyota has no idea where her friends have gone or what they’ve gotten up to, or if Gaila will even hear her comm at this point over the beat of the music in whatever club they’ve chosen, or if she hasn’t switched it off already if she’s gone home with someone.

“Um,” she says, still staring up the street and not really looking at Spock.  “No, I’m not.”

She’s standing close to him, like how they were sitting, so that Spock is still right there, a warm, solid presence against her side.  She doesn’t move right away and he doesn’t either, so they let the rest of the group get two blocks ahead of them, and then three, and then they’re far away enough, gone up a steep San Francisco hill that it makes Nyota feel half alone, left there with only Spock for company and the strangers walking past them.

“So,” she starts, instead of dealing with anything that just happened, a night that she was supposed to spend with Gaila and McCoy and Kirk but instead spent with the head of her department and a dean and Spock completely silent as he slowly finished his drink.  His one drink, because Puri had offered to get him another one and Spock had shaken his head and said ‘no’ and then hadn’t said anything else the entire night.

“Yes?” he prompts and she realizes she needs to follow up what she said with something else, more words to fill in the quiet hanging between them.

She can still very nearly feel his hand on her knee, the way his thumb moved over her skin like that.  She takes a breath and lets it out louder and harder than she meant to, but feels it carry with it much of the urge to watch where the officers went, that crest of the hill they disappeared over.

“Scale of one to examining a petri dish, how much fun did you have?” she asks, watching him instead, so that she sees the moment his brows begin to knit together, and notices how that is very nearly making her smile.  

That was maybe a lot of drinks.  It’s been a while since she’s been out, and that floating, buoyant feeling isn’t being helped by Spock’s attention on her.  And she can definitely still feel his hand on her knee the more she focuses on it.  Her thigh, maybe.  Wherever it is that her knee ends and thigh begins, which should perhaps be more clearly delineated, but his hand is also pretty big so there’s that, too.

“You will have to be more specific as to the intervals of measurement.”

“Erlenmeyer flask?” she asks because she doesn’t want to think about why he touched her, Ho bringing up that test and her professors there at the table, and instead just wants to tip her head back to look at him there next to her, backlit by the street lights and watching her in that way of his.  “I knew it.”

“I did not answer.”

“Pipestem triangle, then?  Positive displacement pipette?  Clinostat?”  He’s an officer, a fact that is so clear to her every hour of every day but seems hammered home tonight, a group of instructors around the table that she never would have shared a drink with outside of an Academy holiday party or award ceremony and even then, cadets keep to themselves mostly, and officers don’t really make it a point to mingle.  Of course, Spock doesn’t mingle either, ever, so maybe that’s ok.  “Pneumatic trough?”

“Are more typical pipettes not included in this hierarchy?”

“No, those are boring.”

“Curious.”

“Spock,” she says, spares one more look up the street, but she can’t see the rest of them anymore, hidden by the night and the hills of the city so that it’s just the two of them now.  

He follows the direction of her gaze and she watches that instead of the line of sidewalk the other officers walked up, the way his eyes trace over where they’ve gone and his mouth tightens slightly.

He doesn’t say anything, just keeps looking after them, and so she doesn’t either, lets the moment hang in the air between them, unstated and unvoiced, a tacit silence stretching between them until she reaches out and snags his hand, tugs at it, making him look down at her fingers curled around his.

When he raises his head from staring at their hands to look at her, she gives his fingers a squeeze. 

“You came,” she says.  That feels better like that, her hand warm and his eyes on her again, his expression smoothing out into not a smile exactly, but something less complicated and impenetrable than before.  “I didn’t think you would.”

She thinks he’s not going to answer, so it’s a surprise when he squeezes back, his fingers tightening around hers, and says, “I did not either.”

“You know,” she says, works her thumb against his and lets what he said warm her through.  “Puri’s going to make you go out all the time now.”

“I am aware.”  He’s looking at their hands again so that she’s free to take him in without his attention on her, free to let herself trace over his eyes and how his mouth looks and the sharp points of his ears, all so familiar to her now.

She’s smiling again and it feels like too much of a bother to try to stop, not when it’s easier to stand there with him than to look up the street at where the others have gone, no matter that they begin to walk in the same direction, her fingers still caught in his in a way that she finds she’s not too eager to bring an end to.  His comment is making her cheeks heat or maybe it’s what he’s doing to her first two fingers, which feels good - different, but good in how it calls up that same languor and hum in her body that the alcohol first started and is being kept going by his touch, and that’s making her smile too, and when she looks up at he’s looking right back at her, his eyes soft in a way she hasn’t seen all night.

It’s beautiful, really, the street they’re walking up lit up with streetlights and cars zipping past, their lights cresting the top of hills one after the other, and the Golden Gate shining over the bay.  Music spills out of a club, a heavy deep beat that rises up until they’re past it, and a bus stops and lets off a group of teenagers, all laughing and immediately racing each other up the street and around the next corner.

They’ve nearly reached the campus gates when she halfway comes back to herself, blinks away the lethargy of how late it is, how slowly they’re walking and instead begins to think not about the warmth of Spock’s hand in hers but of the encroaching nearness of the Academy, the fade of restaurants and cafes and shops into the gym and the Engineering building and the library, still lit up bright against the night sky, students silhouetted in the windows as they bend over their work.

The route is so familiar that it takes her a moment to realize that they’re walking towards her dorm, not towards the faculty apartments.  She stares up at her building, wonders what would have happened if they had come to his apartment building first, if campus were laid out differently, if the bar Gaila had chosen, and Puri and Stoyer too, had been on the other side of the Academy, how this might have ended up differently than standing there, paused where she walks past each morning and evening and a half dozen other times every day, in and out of those doors that lead to the lobby and the turbo lift and then her room.

He’s working all weekend.  She is too, so it doesn’t matter that he’s either leaving tonight or first thing tomorrow morning for the Enterprise and will spend the next two days in orbit, miles above where they’re standing now.  She’ll be deep into her work, hours spent with readings and flash cards and maybe if she’s lucky a chance to go to the gym, and to sleep in on Sunday if she gets enough done tomorrow.  

“See?” she says, gestures with her free hand to herself, back towards the way they came, because she could be at her desk right now and isn’t.  “I listen to you.”

“Occasionally,” he says and he could be by himself in his apartment too, a missed call from Puri on his comm and the silence of his quarters to keep him company.

She doesn’t think about the padds stacked on her desk, so much closer now than when the sun was shining and she was sitting on the quad with him, or in the crush of the bar, because instead she takes him in, standing there in front of her and draws her hand down his sleeve, the fabric warmed from his body and then steps into him, wraps her arms around his waist and holds him there against her until his hands rise to press into her back.

“Are you well?” he asks and she thinks of that moment when Cretek saw her, thinks of everyone’s eyes flicking back and forth between them, feels him solid and firm against her, his heart a rapid flutter when she shifts her hand to cover it. 

“Yes.”  It feels nice like this.  Better still when she shoves away the last of that twisting feeling that the other officers caused, so that she’s only sleepy and warm.  She yawns into his shoulder, leans closer and rests more of her weight against him as his arms tighten.  He smells like clean laundry and that soap he uses and it’s comforting, familiar, makes her think of crawling into a soft bed.  With what would be a jolt if she had skipped that last drink but instead is a much more muddled realization, she registers that the bed she’s thinking about is his.

She starts to say something about that, or about being back at the bar with everyone there, or about the fact that he was there tonight at all, but she’s still leaning against him and so she just tells him, “Lilliputian means something trivial or very small.”

“Thank you,” he says and then he’s bending down and they’re kissing once, quickly, a fast, soft press of his mouth to hers that’s enough to make her face feel hot and after that she’s not entirely sure what, exactly, she had thought to tell him, what words were going to come out if she had spoken because her heart is stuttering in her chest and she’s not entirely sure of what to do with her hands.

She settles on letting them smooth his shirt over his shoulders, putting a few inches between their bodies but not moving any farther away from him, his hands still spread warm on her back.

“Goodnight,” she says and then has to remember that she actually needs to take her hands off of him if she’s going to go inside.

The doors have closed behind her before she questions whether or not that’s where she wants to be, before she can think to stop herself and not leave so quickly to get back to her work and her night and her own bed, but then it’s the harsh lights of the dorm and the turbo lift is ready and waiting on the ground floor and when she turns back towards the doors, all she can see is her own reflection and the room around her, not if he’s still there, standing outside in the dark.


	33. Chapter 33

The low bubbly hum the evening has left her with seems to drain as the turbo lift rises so that when she’s spit out at her floor the hallway seems drab and the lights too bright, grating and jarring on her so that it’s easier to just watch her feet as she walks rather than try to look anywhere else.

She’s nearly tripped over Kirk before she’s seen him there, sitting curled up with his back against the wall and his arms crossed over his chest, his head tipped down.

“You’re in the hall,” she says as he jerks awake, staring up at her with those blue eyes that somehow failed to find him a place to spend the night.  “What did you do to Gaila?”

“Nothing, nothing, she went home with that guy?” he says, his face pressed into his palms and his entire body tightening in a yawn.

“Which guy?”

“With the-“ Kirk gestures to his head.  “Horns.  Like on a goat.”

“Oh, T'Hvaebnerh.  I like him.  He has his own apartment and stays out of my room.”

“Good for him,” Kirk says, scrubbing his hands over his face and pressing his fingers into his eyes before he yawns again into his wrists.  “Good for everyone.  Good for you and you good for Dean Stoyer, good for Gaila and goddamn good for Bones.”

“You’re in a great mood,” Nyota says, leaning one shoulder against the wall and wondering where Spock is, if he’s back at his apartment by now, in his own hallway, one probably empty of terribly annoying classmates who are looking all too morose.

“I’m sleeping in the hallway,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest and pulling his knees up.  “Bones locked me out.  He’s got some girl in there.”

“Good for McCoy indeed.  Who is it, Chapel?”

“No, some friend of Sulu’s.  Navigation specialist.”

“And you couldn’t get yourself invited back to the good nurse’s quarters?”

“No,” Kirk groans, leaning his head back against the wall and staring up at her, his eyes red rimmed and dark underneath, making her wonder what time it’s gotten to be and how long she was with everyone in the bar, if Kirk looks that tired.  She feels it too, the end of the week dragging on her so that the way Kirk yawns makes her want to mirror it with one of her own.  “Even Sulu left with someone.”

“Sulu’s nice, of course he did.”

“I’m nice,” Kirk says, pointing both hands towards his chest.

“You’re you,” Nyota corrects, stepping past him to open her door and letting it slide shut behind her.

She brushes her teeth and her hair and washes her face, staring at herself in the reflection before rubbing her fingers into her eyes. 

When she drops them, she gives into a moment of annoyance with how the sink looks and quickly wipes it clean of strands of red hair, straightening Gaila’s toothbrush so that it’s no longer poised to fall onto the floor.

She’s changed into a t-shirt and a pair of shorts she pilfered from Gaila back in first year and has since refused to give back until each and every one of her earrings is returned, and lets herself stare at her bed for a long time, thinking about soft sheets and how quiet her room is before letting out a sigh that’s loud in the silence, because she’s also thinking about Kirk, his back pressed against the wall and that exhaustion clinging to him.  She wants to be in bed.  Asleep.  Warm and comfortable and not as annoyed as she’s growing.

“You ruined my GPA,” she says when she opens her door and Kirk looks up at her.

“I know.”

“And my day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And there’s no such thing as a secondary duotronic transference transducer,” she says, half hearing the memory of Spock’s voice through her comm.  She could be with him now, still standing outside in the cool night air instead of looking down at Kirk, so that when it feels better than it probably should to say that, she doesn’t bother trying to talk herself out of the little niggle of satisfaction it leaves.

“There isn’t?”

“No.”  

“Oh.”  He has his knees pulled up and his hands laying on them as he stares at the opposite wall.  “I really am sorry, about all of that, the whole thing.  I didn’t - I had no idea.  I really didn’t or I wouldn’t have-“  He waves towards her without looking up, then back towards his closed door and the room he shares with McCoy.  “I’m going to take it again.  Not right away, they won’t let me, but next semester sometime.  Make it up, you know?”

“God, Kirk, why?”

“I can beat it,” he says, like it’s that simple and easy and clear to him.  One more chance and he’s got it, all he needs is another go round and then he’ll have achieved that too, an additional notch in his belt of successes at the Academy.  

“What if you don’t?”

“Then I’ll take it again after that.  And you should do it with me, if you want.  You don’t, I know, but if you do.”

“I really, really don’t.”

“Yeah,” he says, rubs his hands over his knees and gives her a smile, small and twisted.

She stares down at him sitting there, down the hall to his closed door and back at him again, thinking again about how blessedly peaceful her room is with Gaila gone, how tired she is and the weight of the weekend that is waiting for her.  “You can sleep in here.”

“Really?” he asks, gracelessly scrambling to his feet.

“No touching anything.  Or talking.  Or snoring.  Or complaining about my alarm.”

“What time do you set your alarm for?  And for a Saturday morning, Uhura, come on.”

“What did I say about talking?”

“Can we have a pillow fight?” he asks, following her back into the room.  “And my cuticles are a little rough.  How do you want your hair braided?  Do girls get in their underwear right away in these situations or should we wait a bit?  Warm up to it?”

“Goodnight,” she says, and turns off the lights, leaving him to stumble over the pile of shoes and laundry Gaila always leaves between the door and her bed as Nyota gets into her own.

She questions most of her life choices, specifically as they revolve around one Jim Kirk, as he curses once and then sorts around with Gaila’s sheets and blankets, likely straightening them from the rumple Gaila leaves them in each morning, untucked from the mattress and kicked into a mess at the foot of the bed before he’s finally quiet, the silence only broken by the shifting of Gaila’s mattress as he settles in.

She supposes she should be thankful that the silence lasts for as long as it does.

“I can’t believe Bones is getting laid,” Kirk says into the dark and Nyota seriously considers finding something on her bedside table to throw at him, the idea of him here already grating on her when she could have walked back with Spock just a bit slower, stood with him outside a bit longer, anything to delay the fact that Kirk is striking up a conversation with her when she could be outside right now, Spock’s hands still warming her back.

“I’m sleeping.”

“No you’re not, you too are wondering how he brought someone home and I didn’t.”

“He’s a doctor.”

“I’m me.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re here, too, you know.”

“Listening to you?  I’m all too aware of that fact, trust me.”

“No, it’s a Saturday night and you were out with us, and now you’re back here by yourself.”

“I wish I were by myself,” she promises him, pulling the blankets higher and wondering if it’s too cruel to kick him back out into the hallway.  Yes, probably.  Definitely.  Unfortunately.  

“I’m just saying it’s nice to have some company in being alone.”

“I’m not,” she corrects.

“No, I know, because I’m here, but-“

“No, I’m not alone,” she tells him.

“I know,” he repeats, slower and she thinks about clarifying for him, thinks about what she might say but the words never really form in her throat and she told him to not talk to begin with and yet there he is, taking up space in her room, being too loud and keeping her from thinking about the night air and soft fabric under her cheek, warm arms around her and a moment that should have lasted a lot longer. “I got that.”

He’s quiet again, long enough this time that she’s closer to beginning to relax, the drinks she had leaving her empty of energy and the thought of the work waiting for her tomorrow making her want to groan and pull the pillow over her head.

“Why didn’t you come with us when we left Moe’s?” he asks and she hears him turn towards her in the dark.

“Kirk, please, it’s late.”

“I thought the only reason you were out at all was that Gaila twisted your arm into coming.”

She doesn’t answer, not that that’s ever stopped him before and she breathes out a long sigh towards the ceiling.

“You,” he continues, “Have not been very much fun this semester.”

“So sorry.”

“You don’t sound it.”

“I’m not,” she says and when he doesn’t speak again, she wills him to remain quiet.

“So,” he says conversationally just as she’s beginning to relax again.  “You know Stoyer.”

“I’m sleeping, Kirk.”

“That was her husband?” he asks, then doesn’t wait for an answer.  “I think Bones talks about him sometimes.  Doctor, right?”

She stares into the darkness between the beds, then turns to look back up at the ceiling.  “He’s the CMO of the Enterprise.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Huh.”

“Thought you and Pike were buddies,” she points out, irritated with him again, or maybe she never stopped being so, started being exasperated with him all that time ago back in Iowa in a way that has never dissipated.

“Well, he’s not exactly going over the crew roster with me,” he says and she hears him shift against Gaila’s sheets, probably turning on his side to face her, though she doesn’t look over to check to see if that’s what he’s done.  “How do you know Stoyer so well?”

“It’s Starfleet, everyone knows everyone,” she says like it’s as easy as that and she thinks about the shifting cadets and officers around the table, Sulu sitting down with them, and then Ho and Engstrom and Cretek, Hannity showing up with her beer and that smile she had when she looked at Nyota.

“I’m not exactly throwing back drinks with deans on my Friday night, though maybe I’d get a sweet internship out of it if I did,” Kirk says as Nyota brings the blankets up higher.

“It’s not like that,” she tells him, her voice sharper than she meant it to be.

“Not like rubbing shoulders with the higher ups?”

“Like you need to,” she says, still trying to shrug off how Hannity had grinned at her, that creep of cold over her skin as Cretek looked back and forth between her and Spock, and how Engstrom did too, how they were talking to each other as they walked away up the street at the end of the night.

“I know, I know, my brains, my looks, my irresistible charm that is tempered only by my humble-“

“-You know what I mean, Kirk,” she says and the words come out of her too short and too hard.

“‘You’re Jim Kirk,’” Kirk parrots in an imitation of Puri and probably dozens of others.  He sighs - more of a groan, really - and lets his voice slides back to normal.  “I do know.”

“I think he just wanted to meet you,” she says even though she really wants to tell him to not talk about Puri like that, not when he’s been nothing but kind and friendly to her since the first day they met, so long ago now in the mess hall, back when she didn’t know who he was, didn’t know he was Spock’s closest friend or that Spock even had friends, didn’t know Spock at all except for as a professor, an austere and stern and mostly silent instructor in her department.

“He could have just said hi.”

“I thought that-“ she starts, and then stops because she’s not entirely sure what she thinks, exactly.  Not that he milks his last name precisely, but that things are different for him here than for everyone else, and that he’s never really shied away from the attention that being George Kirk’s son brings him, no matter how tight his smile was tonight.  “You’re in my year, you completely skipped first year,” she says, and passes over the fact that she also wants to point out that he gets top marks in his classes because she doesn’t want to have to hear herself say that out loud.  “And you weren’t supposed to take that test until next fall at the earliest.”

“Then neither were you.  And so sorry for fast forwarding through the slog that is the beginning of the Academy.”

She pulls in a deep, long breath and lets it out again slowly, her eyes trained on the ceiling, 

“It’s just that-“

“-I’m smart, ok?” he says.  “I don’t know what to tell you, it’s not my- whatever, my name or whatever it is that you want to think about me.  Or do think that, I can’t stop you, but I tested out of those classes.”

“Fine,” she says.  It’s not fine because she had to take each and every one of those, all the weekly papers and quizzes, and the midterms and finals, and she had to prepare for the lectures and seminars and attend them, and answer questions when called on, and go to office hours so that the professors knew who she was beyond a name on a class roster and a set of test scores, and wait to get her marks back to see if the time she had spent on each and every assignment had been worth it.

“Hey,” he says and when she doesn’t answer, he picks up one of Gaila’s socks and throws it across the space between their beds.

“Don’t.”

“I would sit through Introduction to Starfleet Academy 101-“

“-That’s not a class-“

“-If I didn’t get told my own name on a Friday night in the middle of a bar.”

“Puri’s nice.”

“And if I didn’t have everyone thinking that I just waltzed in here.”

“You did,” she says and that comes out overly severe too, but it’s true.  “Pike met you once, you end up on a shuttle the next morning and in classes the next week.”

“So did Bones.”

“Just don’t pretend that being who you are didn’t help.”

“Is that what this is about?” he asks and she sees him sit up a little bit before slumping back down.  “I can’t just be good at what I do?  You have Dean Stoyer buying you drinks and you’re upset that I passed some prereqs?  How the hell do you know her, anyway?”

“I’m not upset,” she says.  “And Puri got my drink, and one for you too.”

Kirk laughs at that, a short harsh laugh that sounds too close to a scoff.  “You don’t have an issue with me,” he says, and when she opens her mouth to argue, he just plows on and keeps talking.  “You don’t like that someone’s going to think that about you.  Mr. CMO of the Enterprise?  Cadet Uhura, cutting corners and skipping to the front of the line.”

“That’s not-“

“-Oh, but it is,” he says and she can imagine the smile on his face all too well.  It makes her want to get up and walk away, but it’s her room and he’s the one in it, when he could be somewhere, anywhere else right now, leaving her blessedly alone with the memory of the night to think back on, not Kirk saying things that stab too deep into her and make her stare at him across the room like he can possibly see her, and like that could stop him from talking.

“It’s really, really-“

“You can just admit that I guessed right and save us both some time, since apparently you need your beauty rest.  Look, you said it yourself, everyone knows everyone in Starfleet, and what we all know about you is that you’re best buds with a dean, so stop telling me that I’m the one over here asking for favors.”

“That’s not-“

“What you’re doing?”

“I’m not asking for anything.”

“Not going to turn down knowing a dean, though.”

“I wasn’t-“

“Just don’t accuse me of courting attention if you’re not doing the same.”

“I’m not- it’s not like that. I just know her, is all.”

“Then can we just agree that neither of us are doing anything other than just working hard?”

“I-“ she starts, blinking up at the darkness above her. “Yes. Sorry.”

“Did you just apologize? Could I get a recording of that, maybe? In duplicate?”

“Do you want to go sleep in the hall?”

“No,” he says and she hears the blankets shift again around him, though she’s laying stock still, her pulse slightly too rapid for being in her own bed when she’s so tired, the drag of the drinks she had still heavy in her, Kirk’s words playing on repeat in her mind, over and over and too fast. “Hey.”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Hey,” he says again, undeterred as ever.

“Kirk, please.”

“Come on, Uhura, I’m sorry. I know and you know and Dean Stoyer knows that you’re the best student in this place,” he says and she thinks that she might hate something about how soft his voice is, how serious he suddenly sounds, so that it makes her want to pull the sheets higher or to finally convince him to stop talking rather than have him be like this, too nice in a way she’s wholly unsettled by.  “Probably why she likes you so much. Nobody’s ever going to say anything else about how you get wherever it is that you’re going to get in your career.”

“You don’t know that,” she says instead of ‘stop’ or ’don’t’ or the other words that might get him to finally just quit it since this is nothing she ever wanted to talk about with him, nothing she wanted to talk about at all, really, never a topic that was up for discussion and definitely not with Kirk.

“I do. And if they all think something else, we can commiserate together.  Now you say something nice about me, too.  We’ll take turns.”

She picks at her nail until she’s sure the polish is chipping.  She’ll have to fix it in the morning, which will mean that she can’t type while she waits for it to dry.  She can call Spock and let him know she took an extra 30 minutes off from work because Jim Kirk made her scrape her thumbnail clean, kept her up into the night and made her press her lips together so tight it’s nearly painful.

“I’m sorry I said that,” she finally gets out, mostly to keep him from talking.  “About your - name.  And all.”

“‘And all’,” he quotes back to her.  “Thanks.  That was diplomatic.”

“Sorry.”

“Sure.”

“I am,” she says because he’s… well, he’s terrible and too loud and talks too much and is always in her room, but sometimes his eyes get too bright and he looks down at the floor and she hates that even more, so that it mixes in with her annoyance at how smart he is, how everything seems so easy for him, and how despite everything about him irritating her, he’s able to cut to the quick in a way that digs down deep inside of her, places she didn’t really know were so tender. “Don’t you… I don’t know, don’t you just want to know that when you leave here and get up on a ship, that you got there on your own?”

“Yeah,” he says and she hears the blankets shift and she guesses that he’s turned towards her.  “But there’s not much I can do about that.  Everyone has their own opinions, brilliant xenoling students included.”

“I said I was sorry,” she snaps and makes herself breathe in and out, steady and even and slow to keep from doing so again.  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

He snorts out a soft laugh.  “Bones getting some while I’m not bothers me.”

“Kirk.”

“Yes, it bothers me.  I can’t change it, Uhura, so I’m living with it.”  He’s quiet for a moment, the only sound in the room their breathing, before he shifts against the blankets again.  “Though it sounds like you could change it, if you want to.  Ditching the Dean is a lot easier than changing your name, so there’s that.  And if you do, let me know so I can start a support group for people who got resoundingly rejected from being your friend.”

She turns towards him quickly, staring over at him even though she can barely make him out in the dark.  “I didn’t think that’s what you wanted to be.”

His hand waves towards her in the dark and his head shakes back and forth on Gaila’s pillow.  “I gave up on you a long ago, trust me.  What was I going to do, stick around waiting?”

“Says the guy who’s going to retake a test until he passes it?”

“A dozen times if I need to.  And I can take a hint, Uhura.  If you wanted to date me, you’d be dating me.  Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.  Sorry if- I thought you knew that, I guess.  That I wasn’t after - that I just wanted to hang out with you.”

His words lodge in her mind like sharp points, uncomfortable and piercing in a way that she doesn’t want to examine.

“I didn’t,” she finally manages to get out, the words so much simpler than the rushing mess she’s feeling, her mind tumbling over what he said, everything he’s said since she made the potentially ill considered decision to let him into her room.

“I’m sorry.”

She clears her throat, turns back towards the ceiling so that she can resume staring at it and tries to focus on anything but the jump that has started in her stomach.  She presses her fingers hard into her sternum like that could calm it, though it doesn’t, just makes her want to extract a promise out of him that he’ll finally let her go to sleep.

“You’re still annoying,” she tells him, her fingers rubbing small circles.

“I know. Frankly, you’re a little dense.”

“I’m not.”

“Sure.”

She can hear the smirk in his voice before he falls quiet again so that she’s left staring into the dark with only the sounds of him occasionally kicking at the blankets.

“Think I’ll beat it?” he asks, breaking the moment of peace that was all too fleeting and speaking into the silence that she would really rather persist because she’s still thinking about what he said and she’s not done yet, her mind too loud and unsettled for the fact that Kirk wants to keep talking.

She thinks of Spock and Rand walking across the quad only hours ago, of the handful of minutes it took for the test to fall apart around them, that sink in her stomach as she tried to contact the stranded ship, and how nothing worked and everyone’s voices rose up around her, equally frustrated and laced with the beginnings of panic.

“No.”

Spock must have it programmed it somehow or someway to make it happen like that.  He doesn’t make mistakes and she can’t believe that anything he does is by accident and is anything less than calculated, so it’s all too easy to imagine how deliberate that was, planned down to the second and executed in a series of commands of code that he had written.

“What?” she asks when she realizes that Kirk said something that she hadn’t been listening to.

“I asked if you’ll change your mind about dating me.”

“God no.”

“You gonna tell me how you and Dean Stoyer and Mr. Dean Stoyer are so friendly?”

“No.”

“You going to at least put in a good word with her for me?”

“Probably not.”

“Please?”

“Night, Kirk.”

She pulls the blankets up higher and turns away towards the wall, finds a cool spot on the pillow and closes her eyes, still nettled by their conversation, and more so the sounds of Kirk in the other bed instead of Gaila.

They’re both loud though, overly so in a way that is grating, but maybe that’s at least familiar after all these nights of sharing her room with Gaila tossing this way and that.  

Either way, it certainly doesn’t help her sleep so that she’s left blinking into the dark, her mind buzzing with a combination of what was very likely too many drinks, what is certainly the issue of having Kirk so close to her, and what is increasingly thoughts of Spock, now stirred up from her and Kirk’s conversation so that she’s left thinking of him, how the other professors looked at her and what it felt like to have him there next to her as they stared, and increasingly, underneath that discomfort, the growing urge to press her fingertips to her lips, so that she feels as if she could recreate the ghost of the memory of standing outside with him, an idea that seems more and more reasonable the longer she lets the hum of what’s left of the alcohol she had flow through her.

She slides her hand under her pillow so that she’s not tempted to actually do that and firmly closes her eyes, willing her breath to even out.  

It doesn’t.  All that happens in the space between one carefully placed inhale and the next exhale is that she thinks about his shirt under her hands and his body warm against hers and how he bent down towards her like that, his kiss so quick and fleeting.

Which doesn’t bear focusing on at all, since she should be sleeping.  She has work tomorrow, and he does as well and what did or didn’t happen outside of her dorm - didn’t, mostly because she didn’t have much of a chance to return his kiss since it was over so fast - isn’t worth staying awake over.  She’s here, in her bed, trying to fall asleep so that she can get up and get started on her homework tomorrow morning, so that it hopefully doesn’t take her all day, and he’s back at his apartment.

Or he might be up on the ship already, or at least in his own bed, whichever one, bigger than this one and certainly quieter.  Warmer, too, so that she’s never left burrowing under the covers when she’s there like she is now, but instead more often than not kicks them into a mess, winds them around her legs and leaves them tangled.

It probably bothers him that she does that.  Maybe.  No, definitely, because he sleeps so soundly and it can’t be anything but distracting to have someone next to him doing that, when he’s very likely spending every other night in his quiet and still bedroom, uninterrupted by how she pushes at his sheets.

She wonders what side of his bed he sleeps on when she’s not there.  The same one, probably.  Where his enormous pile of condoms is.

Which she’s very much not thinking about, and certainly not continuing to puzzle over, so she presses her palms to her eyes, lets out another even, steady breath and tells herself to quit it.

It works for a few minutes, but then all she can think about is how he was curled on his side the other night, his lips slightly parted in his sleep, and how once he had seemed to nearly awaken before he had done so completely, but had just turned further into the pillow, his expression smoothing out again.  It doesn’t help that he’s probably asleep now.  It’s late and he stays up past when she does, but he has to sleep sometime and is likely doing so now.  In his apartment a couple blocks away, maybe, or up on the Enterprise, whatever it is that his quarters look like there.  Nice, she imagines.  More spacious than most of the crew’s quarters, not that she’s ever seen anybody’s quarters on a ship, since she hasn’t exactly served on one yet, just let that opportunity pass her by so that she could stay on campus all summer and work on her paper.

She could have done both, she knows, can nearly hear Spock telling her that, gotten a position on a ship as a junior Ensign and also worked on her paper, maybe fit something else into the summer months other than just academics.  Been less of a perfectionist about reading every article she could find that might be in someway pertinent, even though she hadn’t used half of them, and not been so painstakingly slow about writing it, so that each and every paragraph took her longer than was completely necessary.  

Not, she thinks, that Spock exactly went easy on her, dropping off all those extra padds and trying to get her to broaden her topic, and assigning her as much reading as she had during the semester, so that she spent the first few weeks of the summer just keeping up with that.

She lets herself look over at her padd where it’s sitting on her desk, but there’s no light flashing that indicates she’s received a new message and why would she have, it’s the middle of the night on a Friday, two days after she submitted her paper for publication, and there’s no way she would have heard back already.

Her comm is sitting there too, slightly askew from where she placed it earlier, at an odd angle to her padd and the edge of her desk.

She risks a look at Kirk, then reaches out and straightens it, pulls her hand back, and then grabs for it again, already flipping it open. 

“I’ll be right back,” she says, pushing the sheets back and only receiving a grunt from Kirk.  “Don’t touch anything.”

“Hello?” Spock says when he answers and she glances back over her shoulder to make sure the door to her room has slid shut behind her, leaving her alone in the hallway.

“You gave me a ton of reading, you know.”

“Nyota?”

“Were you asleep?” she asks. “I’m sorry.”

“I would have thought that you would be.”

“No, I’m awake in the middle of the night thinking about the fact that you dumped a week’s reading on me and a bunch of it wasn’t even on my topic,” she says, leaning back against the wall, near where Kirk was earlier.  

“You will have to be more precise as to when this occurred,” he says and she thinks that he was asleep, despite him not having answered her question, if he isn’t recalling the specifics right away, taking those intuitive leaps of his where he seems to figure everything out a step ahead of everyone else, that mind of his working on overdrive and that look he gets in his eyes as he thinks.

“Over the summer,” she says, thinking that maybe she should let him go, say goodnight and slip back into her room, but instead she adds, “At the beginning of - of everything.  In that cafe.”

“Ah,” he says, and she can nearly imagine the way he’s probably eyeing his comm, that familiar furrow forming on his forehead.  “I do not understand.”

“Do you think I could have done my paper and something else, besides?  That I would have had time?” she asks him, which doesn’t clarify anything at all, but she very much wants to know, feels the suddenness of wanting to hear his answer well up in her.  

“If I had not suggested-“

“-You didn’t suggest, Spock-“

“-Those readings?  Or regardless?”

“Regardless.”

He’s quiet for a moment and she is too, listening to how peculiar it is to talk about this, those months they spent together that since have been lost to a long silence between them while he was gone and now that he’s back subsumed into the daily rhythm of campus so that summer seems all too long ago.  

“Perhaps.”

“No, really, do you think I could have done more over the summer if I had used my time better?”

“If you are seeking an apology for the amount of research,” he begins and then stops, whatever he was going to say lost to the silence that follows.  “I was… At the inception of our-“

“It’s fine.  That’s not- I’m not upset or anything.  About that.  The readings.”  She’s not, that old irritation having died off a long time ago so that it’s a memory that edges towards something else entirely, sitting with him that day, eyeing the stack of readings he had assigned and wondering how she was going to get through it. 

“I was only wondering if… or thinking that if I-“ She pauses, shifts more of her weight against the wall and studies the carpet in front of her, unsure that she should have called him about this, not if she doesn’t know what it is that she wants to say.  “That maybe if like you always tell me, if I worked less or did things differently I could have gotten more out of the summer.  If that’s what you meant.”

“More?” he asks.

“Never mind.”  She waves towards the far wall of the hallway, except that he can’t see her because he’s not there, he’s in his apartment or on the ship and very likely only half awake.  “I’m sorry I called, I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You are not.”

“I’m-“ she starts.  Very slightly tipsy, still.  Tired too.  Confused and aching in a way that makes her want him to lay out a road map, or schedule her next few years of her career with whatever logic and rational and carefully considered and constructed planning that orders his own life so that she could know that what she’s doing is right and so she isn’t left late at night - or very, very early in the morning though she has no wish to ask the computer the time - standing in a hallway questioning herself.  

“You remain concerned,” he says and she closes her eyes, tries to let out the breath she’s holding.

“I am bothering you, aren’t I.”

“I said that you were not.”

She rubs at her eyes with her free hand, digs her thumb and forefinger in and tries to decide if she wishes she hadn’t called him, hadn’t tried to rehash this with him again, in the middle of the night when he should be asleep and she probably should be too, how many times she’s going to feel like she wants to bring this up with him and if she ever gets to the end of that patience he has.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says quietly enough that she’s not sure he can hear it.

“You are speaking on your comm,” he says like it’s really that easy, the answer held in her hand as his voice rises out of the tiny speaker.  “And you stated your goals were to produce a paper of publishable quality and to meet senior officers, both of which you accomplished and which were admirable and logical aims.”

“I guess.”

“I am unsure whether a different set of circumstances would have led to a similar outcome.”

She nods even though he still can’t see her because he’s still not there, and she’s still alone with her comm held in her hand.

“Do you wish you had the opportunity to choose to spend your summer in another manner?” Spock asks, his voice crowding out the tumbling of her thoughts so that she’s left with her comm gripped in her fingers, her back pressed against the wall and her free arm crossed over her stomach.

“I-“ she starts, and then stops, unsure of what it is that she was going to finish that with.  Doesn’t know, maybe, but that doesn’t feel right to say, doesn’t feel true and like it fits, not at all.  He’s right that she achieved what she set out to with her paper and making connections with senior officers and everything else she said she wanted happened, just maybe not exactly how she imagined it, not in a capacity she ever could have pictured or envisioned, or even maybe wanted, but it happened.  Is happening now still. Unanticipated and unexpected as it is.

“No,” she says and feels how true it is as soon as she’s said it to him, the words calming the blood that’s threatening to rush through her so that she’s listening to the quiet of the hallway instead of the rise of her pulse in her ears.  “I wouldn’t. I- It was a nice summer. I was… happy doing all of that.”

“You were.”

“Yes.”

He’s quiet for so long that she’s nearly about to ask him if he’s still there when he finally speaks.

“If you continue to have the same aspirations as you once did, there will be what I believe is a sufficient number of high ranking officers at the event next week.”

“That’s not what… It isn’t why I-“  She swallows.  It’s hard, a lump that is tight and rough feeling sitting high in her throat. It’s not why she called or brought that up, the idea of that party far from her mind, though probably not from his.  “Is that what you- Do you want me to go?  With, uh-“ She tries again, working that knot back down so that it sits in her chest instead, hot and flitting around, her heart feeling like it’s slamming against her ribs so that she’s sure that if she gripped tight enough with the arm still wrapped around herself, she could feel the pounding.  “With you?”

“Yes,” he says immediately, firmly, so quickly that it makes her smile down at her comm, makes her tip her head back against the wall and hold her comm closer to her, tighter.

“Ok,” she says.

“Is that a confirmation that you will in fact attend or were you simply seeking to ascertain my opinion on the matter?”

“Are you going to pick me up?”

“If you would like.”

“Are you going to walk me back to my dorm afterwards?”

“If that is your preference.”

“Are you going to try an olive?”

“I have not as of yet seen them served at this type of function.”

“That’s too bad,” she says, grinning down at her comm, the black casing and the gold cover, the tiny Starfleet logo imprinted on it.  “But I’ll go anyway.”

“You will?”

“I will.”  Her heartbeat has eased slightly and she unwraps her arm from around herself, wipes off her palm on her shirt.  “But I still maintain that those readings were fairly useless.”

“Debatable,” he says and she finds that smile on her face hasn’t diminished at all, has just grown wider.

“What was that?” Kirk asks, when she gets back in her bed, putting her comm carefully on her bedside table, right next to her.  His voice is quieter than earlier, slower and slightly rough and she thinks she hears him yawn.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” she repeats, pulling the blankets up to her chin, flexes her toes against the sheet, and finds that she’s smiling up at the ceiling.

And it’s not nothing, not really, not at all.

“You’re happy,” he says, and in the darkness she sees him turn on his side.

“Go to sleep, Kirk.”

“If you’re that happy about whatever that was, will you tell me your first name?”

“Goodnight,” she says firmly, rolling away from him, thinking about the hug that Spock gave her and how it felt to rest her head on his shoulder, to be held by him like that.

Good, it felt good.  Warm and safe and comfortable and she’s going to see him in the office all week and then on Friday at the party and that’s just as good if not better, soothes some of the thought of how oddly empty campus will seem with him gone for the rest of the weekend.  

For the first time in longer than she can remember, since before the term started and Kirk ever approached her about that damn test, before classes got hard and homework piled up and she didn’t have time to sleep enough or get to the gym or even breathe every day, and before she and Spock weren’t really talking and weren’t really not talking, she falls asleep looking forward to the next few days.


	34. Chapter 34

“This one or the other one?” Nyota asks, craning to get a good look at her back in the mirror and examining everything the dress that Gaila picked out doesn’t cover.

“This one,” Gaila says firmly.

Nyota tugs at the hem, trying to pull it down a bit without giving Kirk an eyeful of anything and wishing not for the first time that he hadn’t insinuated himself on Gaila’s bed and had yet to budge.  

“I’m not sure,” Nyota says, smoothing her hands over her stomach and turning back around, resolving - again - to ignore Kirk’s presence.  “I’d have to change my hair.”

“I like your hair like that, don’t mess with it,” Gaila instructs, coming over and giving the dress a good yank, so that Nyota’s hand flies to her chest and she looks over at Kirk to make sure he’s still reading his padd.

“Stop,” she says, tugging it back up again.

“You stop, you’re going to run out of dresses in this dorm, and there are a lot of people who wear dresses that live here, and a lot of dresses to choose from.”

“I don’t think this one is appropriate,” Nyota says, shaking her head at her reflection.  “It’s too…”

“How do you even decide?” Kirk asks.

“Well,” Gaila says, smiling at Nyota over her shoulder in the mirror, and pulling the dress back down an inch so that Nyota frowns at her.  “We could establish parameters.  Take a sample.  Run a statistical analysis.  In fact, we could start on that tonight, someone will be in the right company.”

“Not funny, Gaila.”  Nyota pulls at it again, still frowning.  “And I just care that it’s right.”

“You do care,” Gaila says, her eyes bright and her smile too wide.  “I have never seen you care like you care right now.”

“I don’t want to spend all night pulling this up every time I move,” Nyota says, readjusting it once more.

“Well you need bigger-“

“-Gaila.”

“I’m not listening, I promise,” Kirk says.  “But if I was, I would tell you that I liked the first one.”

“You don’t get an opinion,” Nyota says.  “And this one is too tight and I don’t have shoes that match.”

“It is not,” Gaila says.  “It is the most boring and dull and classy dress I have ever seen, only out done by the other boringer and duller and classier one you were just wearing.”

“I’m changing,” Nyota says, grabbing the dress Gaila’s pointing to from the foot of her bed, the one that has the lower likelihood of sticking out in a room full of officers who probably have the sense to not take advice from Orions.  “And I’m wearing those new shoes you just got.”

“In full disclosure,” Gaila calls through the bathroom door as Nyota shuts it behind her, already working her way out of the dress.  “Those are Ensign Hames’ and she might be there tonight.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, cause you know O'Heron?  Tall?  Great smile?  He joined us and let me tell you, his-“

“-I do not want you to tell me-“

“-Got all over,” Gaila finishes, undaunted.  “Because I love you, I did not bring my shoes back here.  Rule number two after no interrupted sacred homework time is no bodily fluids.”

“Also no bringing Kirk back here, but you ignored that too.  I’m wearing my own shoes,” Nyota says, opening the door as she adjusts the way the straps lay and looking down to check once more that the dress is, in fact, as suitable as it was the last time she tried it on.  Acceptable, she thinks before she can stop herself, and satisfactory.  “And please don’t tell me any more details.”

“You can tell me more,” Kirk offers.

“You can leave,” Nyota says.  “Any time now.”

“You going to tell me where you’re going tonight?” he asks.

“No.”

He doesn’t leave anymore than he did the first half dozen times she asked him to, just sits there while Nyota gets her heels out of the back of her closet, the ones that hurt after a while and she only bought because they are everything that her practical and comfortable uniform boots aren’t.

“Hold on,” Gaila says, a hand falling onto Nyota’s shoulder as she wiggles her toes, admiring her shoes and wishing that she wore them more while also wondering exactly when it will be that she’ll get to take them off again.

“It’s late, I have to-“ she starts, because she’s not going to make Spock wait for her, not when he probably has a previously decided on amount of time he’s willing to spend out tonight and very likely wants to get back to his apartment or to some lab somewhere, instead of waiting in the parking lot of her dorm on a night that’s been threatening to rain.

At least he doesn’t have any issues about what to wear, she thinks as she adjusts the straps once more, standing in front of the mirror to confirm that where the neckline dips down slightly is unassuming enough, and then turning to look again at the portion of her back that the dress leaves bare, trying to imagine what someone like Ho will wear, or Stoyer, and wishing that she had been able to bring herself to call her.

“Just stop,” Gaila says, fixing one of the pins in Nyota’s hair, then adjusting another one too, taking it out and fussing with the pieces of hair that Nyota had only just finished arranging.  “You look incredible.”

“You do certainly look nicer than after that practicum out in Yosemite,” Kirk says.

“All that mud was very moisturizing,” Gaila says, speaking around the two pins she has stuck in her mouth. 

“I have to go,” Nyota says, trying to twist free.

“Nobody’s going anywhere without you.” Gaila fishes another pin off the dresser and sticks it in her mouth, her fingers gentle in Nyota’s hair as she wraps another piece back and secures it.

“Who?” Kirk asks, again.

“Still none of your business,” Nyota says, gently disentangling herself from Gaila and ignoring Kirk when he asks, “Does this mean you won’t be back tonight?”

Spock didn’t go anywhere without her and is next to his car by her dorm when she finds him there, as neat and put together as she’s ever seen him.

“I think Gaila dug a hairpin into my skull on purpose,” she tells him, her hands raised as she tries to adjust her hair as she walks towards him, down that short length of sidewalk and pavement outside of her dorm that normally doesn’t end with Spock standing there in his dress grays.  “I didn’t wear the dress she picked out and she’s not above retribution.”

She wonders at first if he didn’t hear her since he doesn’t say anything, not about the illogical nature of hairpins to begin with, or that revenge is not becoming of a Starfleet cadet, or an overly obvious solution like simply removing the pin in question and perhaps she might have realized that for herself already.  But none of that comes, no dry comment or confusion over how incredibly odd humans are and Orions too, nothing that leaves her needing to give him an explanation or draws a laugh out of her.  She slowly lowers her hands from fiddling with the pin, smoothing the hair that brushes loose around her shoulders and then pushing it back behind her.

“I’m sorry if I kept you,” she says into the silence.  “Gaila was… Gaila.”

“Hello,” Spock finally says and he isn’t moving towards his car or gesturing towards it but is still just looking at her in a way that makes her half want to check behind her in case there’s a new autoclave or centrifuge set on the sidewalk that she didn’t notice, and which is also threatening to make her cheeks start to heat up, an all too self conscious smile beginning to creep around the corner of her mouth.

“Hi to you too,” she says as lightly as she can with him watching her like that.

It’s quiet outside of her dorm, most students already where they’re going for the night and none of the crush of the crowd that happens at the end of the class day or after dinner, campus hushed for the evening under the low hanging clouds that gathered that afternoon and are darkening the night sky.  It feels quieter between them still, the humid air heavy and stagnant so that she can hear her shoe scrape across the pavement beneath her as she takes another step towards him.

“Ready?” she asks when she’s close enough that she could touch him.  Her hands feel empty hanging there at her sides, and she finds she’s not certain what to say next or do next, not with him so quiet like that and the air around them thick with the promise of rain.

His eyes travel over her and then his finger is on her necklace, so close that she’s sure she can convince herself that she can feel his touch and not just the press of heat from his hand so near to the bare skin of her chest and neck.

“I got it on myself,” she says and she thinks he’s going to drop his hand but he doesn’t and she thinks he might back up but he stays right there, his gaze coming up from where his finger is to meet her own, so close to her that she can see the streetlights reflected in his eyes.

A fat drop of rain falls onto the shoulder of his uniform, followed by another and then another, so that the moment is broken by him reaching for the door handle at the same time that she does, their fingers colliding in what is suddenly a wet, slippery mismanaged grab for it, leaving her hand hot and tingling as rain starts to beat down around them.

He shuts the door behind her and she rearranges her skirt, presses her palms to her cheeks and then drops her hands to fold them in her lap as he slides into the car next to her.

“How was the rest of your week?” she asks, trying to get her fingers to fasten her seatbelt.  They were working fine a moment ago in her room as she slid her earrings in and hooked her necklace closed, ignoring Kirk’s continued questions as to where she was going.  Now, she has to try twice to get the latch to work.

“Acceptable,” he says and he’s not starting the car or turning on the heat against the damp chill that has followed them from outside, but has his hands spread on his lap and is watching her as she adjusts the seatbelt over her chest, trying to be careful to not wrinkle her dress and thinking that if Spock hadn’t already started the evening out so silently, she might have asked him how he does that, manages to stay so incredibly neat all the time so that she’s sure he’ll end the night looking like he just finished ironing his uniform.

It really fits him well, his pants perfectly creased and his jacket all clean, spare lines, the fabric pulling slightly when his chest rises on his breath.

“What?” she asks, brushing her fingers over her skirt again.

“Pardon?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is this not all right to wear?”

He turns the car on and turns so he can look out the window next to him as he reverses out of the parking space, the back of his head to her.  “I have no comment on the matter.”

“Hey,” she says when he’s silent for two blocks, his eyes narrowed as he navigates the slick streets and the hills of the city, the rain a constant drum on the car around them. “We can skip this.”

His eyes flick over to her as his hands shift on the steering controls, the movement all too needless for his normal calm.  “I do not believe that is a viable option.”

“You can say you have some emergency that you just can’t get out of, I mean,” she says, since she’s sure she could list off the reasons that he doesn’t want to be here right now, why he’s so quiet and reserved.  “These big events, nobody really notices.”

“That would be illogical,” he says, his words clipped in a way they normally aren’t, so that she gives him a small smile when his eyes move over to her again before he goes back to watching the street.

“I know.”

He parks in a lot she’s never been to because she’s never ridden in a car to HQ, let alone anywhere else around the city besides that time he drove her out of it, completely silent with tension crackling between them, leaving her staring out the window as the buildings slipped past them, willing herself to be anywhere but stuck in a car with him.

He seems nearly as tense now, and is still so reserved in how he’s just sitting there, his seatbelt unfastened but making no move towards the door, but this time she reaches for his arm, tugs at the cuff of his jacket, the stripes on his sleeve smoother than the textured gray cloth.

“It’ll be over with soon,” she promises, rubbing the fabric between her fingers, the back of her knuckles bumping lightly against his hot wrist.  “And we don’t have to stay long.”

“You would like to.”

“What?  No.”  

“It would be advantageous for your career.”

“I told you I didn’t care,” she says and pulls at his sleeve so that it jostles his arm, just a bit.  “You’re supposed to listen to me, remember.”

“The fact remains that-“

“I,” she says, leaning forward until she can catch his eye, waiting until she’s sure he’s looking at her.  “Will skip right over Lieutenant and Commander and Captain and become a Rear Admiral with or without this party.”

“Will you.”

“Absolutely,” she nods, lets her hand slip from his sleeve to circle around his wrist, her thumb rubbing over the back of his hand, the warm tickle across her skin so familiar now.  “I’m pretty smart, you know.”

His eyes are on her hand, and then on some distant point out the window.  “I am well aware.”

“And I have this research advisor who’s sure that I’m going to get my paper published,” she says, just to see if she can get the corner of his mouth to turn upwards, even just a little bit.

“It is exceedingly probable that will be the case.”

“And I heard that grades aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

“I would still recommend applying yourself.”

“I’m going to apply myself to the bar inside,” she says, working her thumb in circles as she watches him, the tiny shifts in his expression and the tightness around his eyes that he seems determined to ease.  “I picked up some pointers from Puri last week on how exactly to fit that many trips to get drinks into a short time frame.  He’s a lot of fun, you probably shouldn’t have left me with him for that long.”

“I assure you I made all due haste.”

She squeezes his wrist, lets her fingers curl into his palm and squeezes that, too, the heat that spreads across her hand whenever she touches him starting to take up residence in her chest, settling there warm and thick, heavy enough that she tries to swallow against it but it remains, lingering like a sweet, heady weight.  “You did, didn’t you.”

She covers their hands with her other one, tangles their fingers together, pulling his hand onto her lap and tightening her grip on him again until he returns the pressure.

“Let’s go do this, so that we can be done that much sooner,” she says and gives his hand a light tug, holds onto it until he nods.

The party is in full swing when they get inside, Spock’s jacket dusted with rain and her dress more or less dry from the dash from the car.

He stops on the threshold of the room, his hands tucked behind his back and his eyes scanning the crowd, and she thinks if he were anyone else, he’d probably dramatically sigh at the sight in front of him.  He’s not, so his expression just gets slightly blanker and his hands tighten.  She wonders if he knows that he’s done that and has nearly reached for his fingers when he turns from studying the crowd to face her instead.

“Would you like a drink?” he asks and when she nods, he adds, “I do not understand why it is Terran custom to offer such when you are entirely capable of procuring it yourself.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she says, trailing after him, his height and that bearing of his cutting through the crowd easily, the heat of the room rising up around them and banishing the rawness of the rain as they walk further into the mass of officers, the strains of music from a band that she can’t see over everyone’s heads floating towards them.

“Hitting the bar, Spock?” a woman asks him when they get there and he stops so abruptly that Nyota puts a hand on his back, the fabric warm from his body.

“Captain,” he says and Nyota watches the other woman smile at him, lets her own hand slip down to his waist.

“Uhura, right?” the other woman asks, holding her hand out to Nyota with a familiarity she can’t quite place.

“Hello,” she says, pulling her hand away from Spock so that she can shake the officer’s own.

“We met over the summer, you came to the commissioning party with Spock.  I’m Captain Hill.”

“That’s right,” she says, nodding at the memory of that night, the warm summer air and Gaila bubbly and excited next to her.  “How are you?”

“Better now that the party’s here,” Hill says, smiling at Nyota and gesturing towards Spock, who just eyes her before moving towards the bar.  Hill grins at his back before touching the arm of the woman beside her.  “Uhura, this is my wife, Commander Moneaux.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Moneaux asks and holds out her hand too, her handshake much firmer than her wife’s and a smile playing around her mouth.  “I heard all about you.”

“Hi,” Nyota offers, dropping the other woman’s hand and adjusting her dress over her hips before stopping herself, and then is about to do it again before she laces her fingers together, though it feels odd to have her hands there like that in front of her.

“Is this acceptable?” Spock asks from beside her, holding out a glass of white wine and she busies herself taking it, trying to not dwell on what, exactly, Moneaux might have heard.

“Yes, thank you.”

“I didn’t know they had that," Hill says into her own glass of red.  

“Me neither.” Moneaux shifts to see towards the bar, a mass of officers between her and it.  “I think we made a mistake.”

“We did,” Hill nods.

“Classic tactical error,” Moneaux says.  “I blame low blood sugar.”

“We’re starving,” Hill says, taking another sip.

“I would hope not literally,” Spock says.

“I saw a tray of chicken satay and nothing else.”  Hill points her glass towards Spock with a look that makes Nyota think that she can very much imagine Hill in uniform and on the bridge of her ship.  “This is on you if we leave here malnourished, Commander.”

“I assure you I am not responsible.”

“Nope, your ship, your party, you’re supposed to be feeding us.”

“There’s shrimp over there,” Moneaux says, her hand finding Hill’s and then they’re gone into the crowd, the space they were standing quickly filled in by other officers trying to get to the bar.

“Is there any Vulcan equivalent to this?” Nyota asks quietly, letting herself get bumped slightly to the side, further away from where a line is forming.

“No,” he says as he eyes a platter of tomatoes with mozzarella balanced on them.

“Those are good,” she says, not that she’s ever seen him eat much cheese.

“We do not typically celebrate such occasions that are as banal as construction with such excess,” he says, not reaching for one and only watching as she does.

“Do you do anything with excess?”

“No.”

“Birthdays?”

“No.”

“Graduations?”

“No.”

“Weddings?” she asks as she takes a tiny quiche from a passing tray.

“They are private.”

“What does that mean?” she asks but he doesn’t respond, his attention off across the crowd and she thinks that maybe he saw somebody he knows, someone he actually wants to talk to but when she turns to look there’s nobody there that she recognizes.

“Are you going to answer?” she prompts him.

“No.”

“I’m going to look it up,” she says, which makes his eyes cut back towards hers.

She waits for one of his comments, one of the ones he would deny is intended to be funny, but it doesn’t come and all he says is, “I would not appropriate much time to a thorough search.”

“Well,” she says and picks up a stuffed mushroom from a passing tray.  “I can always ask your mother.”

That doesn’t get any response out of him, which only makes her more interested, more willing to press him and find out except that when she starts to gather herself to do so all she can think about is his injured hand cradled in hers, his eyes not meeting hers.

“Anything is better than my sister’s wedding was,” she says instead of pushing the topic.

“You have a sister in addition to your brother?”

“And a brother in law,” she says and shrugs, trying to find those quiches again but the tray of them is gone, carried off into the mass of people around them, so she satisfies herself with a sip of wine instead.  It’s good, or at least better than what she normally drinks with her friends, crisp and light like she enjoys, so that it makes her wonder what exactly Spock picked out for her.  “Talk about an ordeal, that makes this look like a cake walk.”

“A…” he starts and seems unwilling or unable to repeat what she said, his head dropping to the side and his brows coming together.

“A walk, made out of cake,” she clarifies.  “As in a pathway.”

“That is not true.”

“No, it’s not,” she says, reaching out and touching his arm.  “It means that something was easy.”

“Your tone did not indicate such.”

“Well, you’ve never met my sister,” she says and she still hasn’t pulled back her hand so she doesn’t bother to, just takes another sip of her wine and keeps smiling at him, trying to picture what that might possibly be like.  

“You imply it would be a formidable experience.”

“You handled Gaila just fine.”

The corner of his mouth quirks and she lets the crowd push her closer to him, already trying to imagine what he might say next when his gaze is suddenly pulled above her head and his expression smooths once again.

“Having fun, sir?” McKenna asks.  He grins at what Nyota presumes is his own joke, until it fades under the way Spock is looking at him.

“Beats the ship’s food,” Olson says, appearing beside him with Pike and snagging a tiny crab cake off a passing tray and popping the whole thing in his mouth.  “The replicators broke again, pack your protein rations for the weekend, Commander.”

“You could fix them, Olson,” Pike says, helping himself to a crab cake and passing one to Nyota as well.

“Been trying to, sir,” Olson says, taking another one from the tray.  “These are good.”

“Maybe we can get some to go,” Pike says.  “Make sure you pack a doggy bag, Spock.”

“It’s-“ Nyota start when Spock looks at her, squeezing his elbow and drawing him into her so that she can explain, when Stoyer’s suddenly there, clapping Pike on the shoulder with the hand not holding her wine glass.

“If it isn’t the Enterprise’s boy’s club.  Aren’t you all supposed to be mingling?”

“We are mingling,” Pike says, as Stoyer gives him a peck on the cheek.  “Just with each other.  And we’re not a boys club.  Hi, how are you?”

“Maybe you should hire more women, then,” Stoyer says, smiling right at Pike who lets out a sigh that makes Nyota think this isn’t the first time this conversation has happened.

“Thanks for that, Arlene.”

“No problem, Chris.”  She jostles his shoulder lightly before turning to Spock.  “Where’s Puri?  He up and left for the bar in the middle of a conversation with Admiral Komack and I haven’t seen him since then.”

“We’ll go get him,” Olson says.

“Mingle, you two,” Pike calls after him and McKenna as they push their way back to the bar.  “And don’t- ah, too late.  I’ll be back, I need to tell them that-“

Nyota doesn’t hear the end of his sentence, his words lost to the crowd and then Stoyer’s hugging her so that she has to let go of Spock to return it.

“Hi, look at you,” Stoyer says, holding her at arm’s length so that Nyota wants to smooth down the front of her dress again, but she can’t with her glass of wine and Stoyer’s grip on her.  “I’m glad you’re here.  Beats a night at the library, right?”

“I think I’m expected to tell you that’s where I’d rather be,” Nyota says, which makes Stoyer laugh.

“Do you run your cadets through what they’re supposed to say?” Stoyer asks and Nyota turns to Spock, thinking that Stoyer was talking to him except that it’s Ho that answers, appearing out of the crowd with two wine glasses.

“This is from Puri, he’s lecturing the bartender on whatever type of ale it is that isn’t here tonight,” Ho says, passing Stoyer one of the glasses.

“Of course he is,” Stoyer says and takes a healthy sip.

“And we do,” Ho says, giving Nyota a smile, one that she returns as she pushes back that slight jab of unease that seems determined to crop up once again, the one that sat in her stomach most of last Friday night and which she really doesn’t want to have to endure for a second evening.   Especially since of everyone, Ho is so friendly and warm that Nyota tamps down on that disquiet that wants to remind her that all of her friends are in the dorm, in the mess hall, out at some bar or club and certainly aren’t standing with a dean and their department head.  “Week one of xenolinguistics training is small talk at parties.  Hi Uhura, Commander.”

“See, it should be that,” Nyota hears and then Engstrom’s there, Irani right next to her and Cretek behind them and Nyota tries to tell herself that she should be glad that she knows them, that among an entire room of officers there’s at least a handful that she’s familiar with, even as odd as it is to see them there dressed up when she was just coming around to the idea of having seen them out of uniform in that bar.  It’s fine, though.  Completely fine, she tells herself as she takes another sip of her wine, Spock a warm, silent presence at her side.  “Let’s have intro to xenoling just be a practicum of different social events.  Can we get funding for that, sir?”

“No,” Stoyer says.  “Or yes, but only if I’m invited.”

“Would that be better or worse than Amano’s class?” Irani asks and Nyota realizes a beat too late that the Lieutenant was directing the question towards her.

“His class was interesting,” she says quickly, curling both hands around her wineglass.

“Ok, better or worse than Lisa’s?” Irani asks.

“Sorry?” Nyota asks and Irani has to gesture towards Cretek before she catches on, feeling a flush spread over her cheeks as she does.

“Oh, I didn’t- It’s-” Nyota says and starts to take another sip of her wine as an excuse to gather herself for a moment, but doesn’t, and then tries to think of if she had ever heard Cretek’s first name before, but can’t, because Nyota’s only known her from the lecture hall and the odd departmental meeting.  And, she thinks, swallowing, now last week and now tonight.  “I haven’t taken the Lieutenant’s midterm yet.”

“I heard you were nearly as tough as our Commander here,” Stoyer says to Cretek with a broad smile, then gestures around all of them with her glass, motioning to the rest of the crowd.  “And what, really, could be more fun than this?”

“I believe the correct response is ‘nothing, sir’,” Engstrom says, taking a long sip of her wine.  Nyota starts to pick at the stem of her own glass and then stops herself, forcing her hands to still.

“Food,” Irani says, staring off towards a tray of fruit.  Spock would like that, Nyota thinks, but it’s too far away to grab him any so she doesn’t try to, just takes a sip of her wine that is rapidly warming with her hand curled so tightly around the glass.  “Wasn’t there supposed to be dinner?”

“Ok, food, yes,” Stoyer says.  “The lack there of is the best way to tell I had nothing to do with planning this.  But that’s not the right answer.”  Stoyer points to Nyota, who shakes her head and busies herself with her glass again instead of trying to guess, and then at Spock, who doesn’t react at all.  “In celebration of, well, nothing really, tickets to parrises squares.  Tomorrow night.”

“Really?  Against Mars?” Ho asks, wrapping her arm around Stoyer’s shoulders and squeezing.

“For my favorite department,” Stoyer says and even Cretek is smiling.  “Which is Xenoling plus all the others.  And I know, I know, it’s your weekend, but Archer let us get a block of seats.”

“We’re coming,” Ho says firmly.  “All of you are coming, that’s an order.”

“Is there reserved space specifically for his beagle?” Irani asks.  “Is he going to make some cadet take it out for a walk at half time?”

“The dog is MIA,” Stoyer says.  “I think we’re going to put an APB out on it.  Either that or let the incoming class know it’s a prereq for spring semester that one of them finds it.  We won’t lift registration holds until it’s back in Archer’s office.”

“Get the entire Academy involved,” Cretek says.

“We’ll spare Uhura,” Stoyer says, then reaches out to touch Nyota’s earrings, the smile she directs at her so natural and unreserved that it’s easy to return it.  “I like these.”

“Thank you,” Nyota says, reaching up to touch them as well, her elbow knocking into Spock’s arm as she does so.

“I have to go find Johnson so he can tell his people too,” Stoyer says, giving Nyota another smile before she edges off into the crowd.

“Tell him that you’re keeping the best seats at the game for us?” Ho calls after her, “Or that Starfleet is going to grind to a halt if Archer doesn’t get that dog back?

“That’s classified, Commander,” Stoyer says, tossing the comment over her shoulder as she disappears back into the crowd.

“This a huge game,” Ho says and Nyota thinks she might be rubbing her hands together if one of them wasn’t holding a drink.  “If we win, we play the Tellarites next week.”

“If we win, Hill owes me thirty credits,” Engstrom says.  “Not that we were gambling, sir.”

“Of course not, Lieutenant,” Ho says smoothly.  “Because if you were, that would mean she bet against the Terran team and we couldn’t have that, now could we.”

“Exactly.”

Spock’s eyes are darting between the other women and land on Cretek when she asks, “Did you ever play, Commander?”

“No,” he says, shifting slightly next to Nyota, his hands behind his back and the fabric of his sleeve brushing against her shoulder.

“There isn’t a Vulcan team, correct?” Cretek asks.

“There is not.”

“You should come tomorrow,” Cretek says and Ho nods.  “Check it out with us.”

“You two should definitely come,” Ho echoes, catching Nyota’s eye and smiling at her like how Stoyer was, so casual and relaxed that Nyota thinks she could forget about how Ho looks from behind her desk or in meetings, and how easy that would be to do, to let this slide into something more normal.

Except that Monday is coming and as far away as the department feels right now, dress grays and dance music and glasses of wine will be equally foreign under the harsh lights of the hallways and the swarm of her classmates as they move from lecture hall to lecture hall, weighted down with padds and filmplasts and homework to turn in to the officers she’s standing with now.

“I am not available,” Spock says just as Nyota’s trying to imagine what tomorrow might be like, yet another evening spent with all of the instructors, Spock so quiet in a way that he never is when it’s just to two of him. 

“Are you working?” Ho asks and Nyota wonders if he really is, or if he’s just not willing to submit to a second evening of this in a row.  Either way, he was never going to accept, never going to spend more time out than he had to so Nyota doesn’t let herself spend any longer picturing how it might be to go with him and the rest of the professors, and Puri and Stoyer too, she imagines and maybe even the rest of the ship’s crew.  “There is no way that Pike’s making you work tomorrow night too.  Five credits he’s there, rumor has it that he rescheduled the Lexington’s yard period the year we made it to the finals just so he could make it to the match.  Arlene told me that he - Sir.”

Admiral Barnett steps right in front of Engstrom to hold his hand out to Ho, so that both Engstrom and Irani have to take a step back to make room for him, exchanging a look over their drinks.

“Admiral,” Ho says, shaking his hand with a familiarity that Nyota can’t begin to imagine, not when she was in class all day, in her cadet uniform and then spent the early evening in her dorm, a world away from a life where she would greet such a senior officer with the ease that Ho has.

“Spock,” Barnett says, letting go of Ho’s hand and giving him a once over which Spock returns with a nod and that’s something, that he knows Spock by sight, that they’re so familiar with each other.  She doesn’t know whether she should be surprised or not, since Spock certainly sticks out in any crowd but it’s still odd for her, to be standing right there next to him as Barnett asks after the ship.

“The status of construction was in the report Pike and I compiled,” Spock says quietly enough that only she can hear as Barnett, seemingly satisfied with Spock’s answer, turns back to Ho again.

“I never said small talk was logical,” she whispers back and she thinks it’s only due to his hearing that he doesn’t have to duck down to make out what she’s saying over the noise of the crowd, though that doesn’t keep her from turning into him, just slightly, as she speaks.  “But it’s an old and hallowed Terran tradition and you yourself said that it is not illogical to observe-“

“I believe there may be exceptions to that rule.”

“Oh, now you say that.  Convenient, really.”

“And who’s this, Commander?” Barnett asks and Nyota shifts back from Spock, hoping that the Admiral is talking to Ho, but he isn’t.  His eyes are right on her and she resists the urge to wipe her palm off as she holds her hand out to him.

“Uhura,” she volunteers, wondering if he remembers her from the speech that he gave her class during orientation her first semester at the Academy.  Probably not - it was years ago now and she was one face among many, and when he shakes her hand there’s no spark of recognition.  It’s a relief when his attention slides away again, some comment to Ho that she can’t quite hear over the crowd and could ask after except that she doesn’t, and won’t, preferring to take a sip of her wine and let her arm brush against Spock’s again.  They can go search out Puri, maybe, or at least a different corner of the room and see about finding something that he might want to eat.

Except then Barnett is turning towards them again, smiling this time.  “I didn’t know you were bringing anyone tonight, Spock.”

She makes a note to ask Spock at some point, some time in the future when admirals aren’t staring down at her, when they’re not at a party and her skin isn’t itching with how Barnett looks absolutely too pleased to have said that, why officers don’t have anything better to talk about.

He won’t know, she imagines, can clearly picture the way he will shake his head and give some exasperated explanation that will nearly certainly revolve around humans lack of capacity for logic.  They can laugh about it - or she can laugh and he can have that reluctant amusement that is nearly just as good and the tension will pop like a balloon would, be carried away with a few words between them like it was never there at all.

Now though, they’re not alone and she’s not making light of it and he’s not shaking his head, not offering up any information because he’s standing there completely motionless, close enough to her that his sleeve is still touching her arm, the silence stretching and stretching.

She could say something.  Should probably, since she was always the one of them that diffused these moments, even though no words come to mind because how often is it that she talks to an admiral and how frequently does she have a chance to have their attention on her, and wasn’t that the whole point of all of this, back in the summer when it was clear that knowing Spock would create these types of opportunities for her.

She takes a deep breath, lets it out in a way that she hopes isn’t too obvious and continues to not look at Spock, who is also not looking at her.

“How’d you two meet?” Barnett asks and that maybe is worse.

She takes another sip of wine, looks away.

“Advanced Morphology,” Spock finally says.

“Oh isn’t that nice,” Barnett says and it’s not nice, it’s fine, and it’s true at least, even though she feels like her cheeks and neck are flushed too hot.  “So you’re in communications, then?”

“I am,” she answers in what she hopes is a crisp way, neat and pat and professional, like how she answered Spock that first day, so long ago now when he called her name from his class roster.

“Ops is what runs the ships,” Barnett says.

“So I have heard.”  There’s no pause from Spock as he says it, no long beat as the conversation waits for his response and she thinks of his kitchen, of bowls of soup and bare feet and what was a long time ago now, what was private and personal and secluded behind the walls of his apartment, no crowd around them, nobody else to see or hear or be there at all except for the two of them.  “Uhura also speaks all three dialects of Romulan.”

“I didn’t know there was more than one,” Barnett says and beyond him Nyota sees Engstrom sigh into her wine glass, her eye catching Irani’s and then Nyota’s own as she shakes her head at the Admiral’s back in what is so clearly an irritated way that if Nyota weren’t so distracted by the gesture she might be tempted to smile.

“There’s a fourth that is only preserved in their archeological records which the Lieutenant is translating,” Ho says, gesturing to Irani, who stops grinning at Engstrom over her own glass and immediately lowers it, nodding quickly at the Admiral.

“That,” Nyota hears as a blue hand appears on Spock’s shoulder.  “Is just fascinating.  Admiral.  Commander.  Sorry, Commanders.  And if it isn’t the whole Xenoling gang, hi Uhura.  Where’s Hawkins?  Does he know that this is where all the fun is being had?”  Puri steps around Nyota to pull Irani into a quick hug.  “You weren’t out with us last week, you didn’t get to see the utterly unprecedented sight of our favorite Commander enjoying himself.”

“Hey,” Ho says and Puri turns and hugs her too.

“Sorry, our other favorite commander,” he says.

“Don’t worry, I heard all about it,” Irani says and she’s smiling right at Nyota, so that Nyota’s so focused taking a sip of her wine and not meeting Irani’s eyes that she doesn’t notice in time that Spock is pulled a step away, and then another by Barnett introducing him and Ho to someone wearing captain’s stripes.

It leaves her alone with the rest of the professors and Puri there or not, it’s really no better than having Barnett staring at her, and no matter how quiet Spock was, at least he was next to her, not an arm’s length away, and then two as the crowd shifts around them, a trickle of officers slowly forming a pathway as they head to the bar or the dance floor or wherever it is that they’re going that leads them between her and Spock.

“Uhura,” Engstrom says before Nyota can decide whether to try to follow Spock.  “We have a question for you.”

“We do,” Irani confirms and Nyota doesn’t let herself tighten her fingers on her glass.

“Ok,” she says because she’s a Starfleet cadet and is going to be an officer someday and having a group of instructors staring at her at a party is hardly going to be the most unpleasant moment of her career, though she’s not entirely able to imagine a scenario that could possibly be worse.

“Did you really tell Commander Spock that he ruined the language tutorials?” Engstrom asks and Nyota lets out a breath, adjusts her hand on her glass since her palm feels too slippery, wet and slick against the curve of it.

“Ho says you did,” Irani says.

“You did?” Puri asks, his smile one of delight.  “Oh, I bet you did, didn’t you.”

“He didn’t ruin them,” Nyota says.  “I never said that.”

She didn’t, she said… something that she can’t remember right now, said it into her comm when he was a solar system away and she never would have ever thought she would be here now, face to face with professors from her department who heard anything about her opinion, one which she can barely recall with all of their eyes on her like they are.

“Don’t be nice, he’s not here, we won’t tell him,” Puri says.

“Yes you will,” Nyota says, her voice sounding lighter to her ears than she thought it would be.

“I will,” Puri says, heaving a sigh, though it doesn’t cause his smile to falter at all.  “You’re right.  Probably just as right about that as you were that he ravaged them with whatever application of logic he deemed best at the time.”

“They’re better now than they were,” Cretek says.

“They’re faster than they were,” Engstrom corrects.  “That doesn’t mean they’re better.  Uhura, you need to get him to change them back.”

“Do it for us.  Please,” Irani says and to Nyota’s surprise, the other woman puts her hand on Nyota’s shoulder and drops her voice in a way that were it anyone else, it would probably make Nyota smile at how grave Irani sounds, coupled with the other woman’s slight grin.  “We need you on this.”

“They’re fine,” Cretek says.

“They are not fine,” Engstrom says and shakes her head.  “Uhura, we’ll back you up.”

“It was- Ho asked him to do it,” Nyota says quickly, trying and failing to imagine Spock actually talking to the Commander about any of this, but he apparently had, not that she knows when or in what manner or really why, since she hadn’t thought he would have taken it so seriously.  But he must have, and must have carved out time to bring her thoughts to Ho.  She can’t help but wonder when it was, and how he did it, if it was a message sent right after they spoke, or any of the days that he’s been around the department since he’s been back, and if he was ever going to tell her about it and if she wasn’t here tonight, if she would have found out.  

“We’re going to talk to her, too,” Engstrom says and Nyota follows the other woman’s gaze to where Ho and Spock are still talking to the Admiral.  They must be discussing the ship because Spock is actually speaking, not standing there silently with that slight air of irritation that seems to cling to him in these situations.  

“The entire future of the department hinges on this,” Irani says before she lets Nyota go.

“Don’t listen to her, it’s not that important,” Engstrom says.  “Though she is right.”

“Oh stop,” Cretek says.  “She’s a cadet.”

“So?” Puri asks.

“It’s none of - Uhura, they shouldn’t be talking about this in front of you,” Cretek says.

“No, that’s why it’s perfect,” Irani says, waving her glass towards Nyota.  “Student initiated feedback, the Academy loves this kind of stuff - doesn’t Stoyer love that, Puri?”

“She does, almost as much as she loves the fact that the admin offices no longer have to cater to that dog. Did she tell you it’s gone? I’m pretty sure that’s why this party is really happening tonight, all the admirals and deans are so thrilled.”

“We all know that Commander Spock will listen to you,” Irani continues.

Cretek takes a sip of her wine, her eyes on Nyota.  “Apparently.”

“The only thing that is apparent,” Puri says, “Besides the fact that Arlene probably did off with that dog herself, is that I need to hear in much more detail how exactly the Commander so royally f- Sir?”

Nyota looks over at Barnett too, hearing Puri’s name over the crowd.  Spock gestures to him in that economical way that he has with his movements and she’s sure that she can hear him say something about Puri’s position, but Barnett doesn’t turn around and next to her, Puri just shakes his head.

“I hated that,” Puri says quietly so that Nyota has to shift closer to him to hear, which takes her further from the other women in a way that she doesn’t particularly mind.  “Arlene always got pulled away like that and still does.  I swear we used to walk outside and two dozen officers would want to talk to her and she was only a Lieutenant Commander when we got together.”

“Only?” Nyota asks.

“It’s even worse now, so it doesn’t get better after you graduate,” he says, both of them watching Barnett ask Spock something that makes Spock nod, his hands neatly tucked into the small of his back again and his eyes cutting over to her and Puri before he starts answering whatever the question was.  “I can tell you that once an Admiral paid attention to me for about thirty seconds because she got a splinter.”

“Highlight of your career?” she asks instead of trying to imagine what her life will be like when she graduates, when she’s not a cadet any more but has her commission the same as everyone else in the room, when Cretek can’t point out her rank at a party and her thoughts on how tutorials are programmed won’t be so notable, but just part of her job.

“Absolutely.”  Puri drains the rest of his drink and sets the glass down on a nearby table.  “Better get used to it until you outrank him.”

She has to smile at that, finding that it’s easy enough to do so it’s just the two of them now, the rest of her professors talking amongst themselves so that she feels much lighter faced only with Puri.  “I’m not going to outrank Spock.”

“I don’t know, captain stripes would be a good look on you,” Puri says, then takes her glass from her and places it next to his.  “Let’s go have some fun while they get bored out of their minds by the highest echelon of officer this place has to offer.  Anonymity has it’s benefits and you can give me the specifics about the havoc Spock wreaked in your department.”

He holds his arm out to her and gestures with his chin over to where a handful of couples have started dancing, more and more joining them as music picks up louder and faster from somewhere beyond the mass of people.

“Really?” she asks, feeling her smile grow wider.

“I’m not getting my wife back from the clutches of the Admiralty any time soon,” he says as she takes his arm and lets him lead her away from Cretek and the rest of them.

By the time a handful of songs have ended, she’s half out of breath from his dancing and laughing at his running commentary on the other officers in the room, careful to keep herself from smiling too wide in the direction of the poor lieutenant two couples away who he’s telling her about.

“I’m serious, Uhura, he got ectoplasm everywhere and Number One - Pike’s first officer?  Before Spock? You should have seen her - she’s where Arlene gets that look she has when students end up in her office - the poor guy scrubbed the inside of every Jeffries tube on the ship.  I think it took him three weeks.”

“And you weren’t involved in this at all?”

“I wasn’t.  Did Spock already tell you this story?  Because I had nothing to do with it, no matter what he said.”  Puri gives her a hard look, one which is largely ruined by the way he then lifts their hands and spins her around as the music starts up again.

“I can’t believe Starfleet lets you two serve together,” she says as he pulls her back.

“We’re a packaged deal,” he says as he deftly maneuvers them past where Hill and Moneaux are dancing, throwing them both one of his broad smiles.

She lets him spin her once more, laughing when he does it again and then again, unsure of when she last danced with someone like this, so fun in such a different way than the clubs she sometimes goes to with Gaila.

“It’s nice that he has you,” she says when the music is sedate again once more and Puri isn’t making the glass of wine she had seem like two or three with the room swirling around her.

“What would Spock say?” Puri asks, giving her hand a friendly squeeze before twirling her once more, “Oh, yes.  Likewise, my dear.”

She’s too focused on not bumping into an ensign and his partner to answer, and once Puri’s pulled her back again the song has ended.

“Let’s get some air,” he suggests before she can come up with anything to say, and then he’s sliding through the crowd and she’s saved from having to keep trying to think of how to respond.

Rain is still pouring down outside, the small balcony Puri leads them to sheltered as long as they stay back from the edge where water is splashing up near the railing.  The beat of the rain drowns out most of the noise of the party behind them, the night air a welcome respite of relative quiet, the music loud enough to reach them without as much of the clamor of conversation.

“Is it too cold for you?” Puri asks as he holds his hand under the water streaming off the awning above them.

“No, it’s nice.”

“Can I tell you something?” he asks, his voice so abrupt that she backs away from watching the water play over the railing.

“Yes?” she says but it comes out like a questions so she presses her palms to her stomach, adjusts how her dress is sitting, and tries again.  “Of course.”

“When we were gone - Spock and I, when we were on the ship,” Puri says and he’s not looking at her but at the water pooling in his palm before he dumps it into a small puddle on the edge of the balcony and shakes his hand off.  “I thought that - Spock was so… how he is about everything that I thought that maybe you two weren’t together anymore.”

“Oh,” she says and tugs at her dress again.

“But he said you didn’t break up and I-“ Puri stops, then shakes his head and puts on a smile.  “I’m glad.  I didn’t - I had never seen him like that and I’m glad that whatever it was, it wasn’t that you two had called things off.”

“It wasn’t that,” she hears herself say, because of course they didn’t break up, because they were never together in the first place.  Logical.  Simple, really.  Rational and well reasoned and completely and utterly valid to answer like he had, so sensible that there’s no reason that she should be shivering with the flush that has spread across her skin.

“Good,” Puri says and nods and his smile seems to come easier.  “You two are really…  Well, you know how you are.  He’s so happy.”

She starts to say that she doesn’t, but she’s not going to tell Puri that, so she starts to nod, except that she finds that she can’t, so she goes to say that Spock would never admit to being happy but that seems wrong to give voice to, so she determines to change the subject except that instead of doing so, she asks, “Was he ok?” at the same time Puri turns to her and says, “Think there’s anything else to eat?”

He reaches out and touches her shoulder, his smile wide and brilliant.  “Yes, he was fine.  Dragged me shopping, though I think I owed him one.”

“He said-“ she brushes her hair back, twists it around her fingers before letting it go since she spent such a long time on it that she doesn’t want to make a mess of it, not just to have something to do with her hands.  “He told me that.  That you two went together.”

“It was a great plan.  Arlene put her postcard on the replicator, she loves it,” he says.  Nyota’s about to ask whether he wrote on his when he turns back to look inside and says, “We should have grabbed some of those shrimp.  And can you explain to me why humans feel the need to serve everything on those little pieces of toast?”

“Crostini,” she says, landing upon the word, dredging it out of the rush of her thoughts about that time when they were gone, of Spock up on the ship, so incredibly far away and being however he was that Puri had asked him that.  She can’t imagine it, except that she can, those silences of his and that way he has about himself that wouldn’t have drawn anyone’s attention, but certainly would have caught Puri’s notice if it was obvious enough.  And it had been.  She smooths her dress again, adjusts one of the straps, tries to ignore the memory of the beginning of her own semester and says, “No, I can’t.  I think it defies explanation and very likely logic as well.”

She starts to ask him what he meant, exactly, about when they were gone, what precisely it was that he was getting at, and how the conversation went, and who said what, but with specifics and details and the precision that she desperately needs, but he’s smiling and looking past her and she feels the moment slip away.

“I think Arlene wanted those for our wedding,” he says and she feels herself nod.

“That would have added a slight diversity from the platters of meat,” Spock says and she turns to find him in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright lights of the party, everything that’s tumbling through her suddenly pausing, then stilling, her heart catching between one pounding beat and the next so that she can draw in a breath and then another one. The coolness of the night soothes the flush that’s still spread across her and she welcomes the smooth slick of calm she feels as he moves next to her, eyeing the water that’s sheeting down past the edge of the balcony and her pulse settles with him so close.

“We’re commiserating over the lack of food,” Puri says.

“At your wedding?  Eminently logical, Doctor, as neither I nor your wife-“

“-Stop,” Puri instructs.  “That was the best meal I’ve ever had, unlike tonight.”

“Did you not eat beforehand?” Spock asks and she’s sure that she’s staring at him and that she should stop, but if he notices he doesn’t say anything and Puri’s still talking, so she lets herself just look, everything about him so familiar to her, his manner and movements so commonplace in her life now that she thinks she might have been able to predict how he peers up at the rain, standing far back enough that none of it splashes on him.

“No, Uhura and I both blindly trusted that Starfleet would actually provide for its officers.  Don’t tell me that you knew to have dinner.”

“I did not,” Spock says, still right next to her.  

“Not even the judicious use of logic could have prepared any of us for facing this,” Puri says, that wide smile of his aimed right at Spock.

“I was under the impression than at open bar assuaged all other concerns.”

“It comes close,” Puri says, patting his stomach.  “I’m going to go in search of more food.  Good thing that Ambassador isn’t here, she would not approve of the lack of dinner and I have to say, I don’t either.  If I find anything bigger than a skewered tomato, I’ll report back.”

“She would most definitely not approve,” Nyota says when he’s gone, leaving the two of them alone with the night air and the rain still crashing down around them, the back of her mind still turning Puri’s words over and over as she watches Spock.  “Or she would have brought her own steak.  Two of them.  Maybe three, and eaten them in the middle of the dance floor.  I think I miss her a little.”

“You do?”

“It was fun with her here, wasn’t it?” she asks, thinking of all that time before Spock left with Puri, before he was gone and they barely spoke, before he came back and was in his office that day, sunlight streaming around him as he examined his bookshelf.  “She was so… difficult.”

He moves closer to her, his body heat a welcome warmth the longer she spends outside, so that she edges closer as well, no matter that she feels slightly shaky, a little tremulous and nearly as watery as the rivulets of rain streaming down around them.  It’s easier to gather her thoughts than it is to speak so she watches the rain with him and alternates between studying how the water falls, pouring and pounding down, and the way the lights play over his profile until he catches her at it.  

“Is this ever fun for you?” she asks, wondering how long he’s known that she’s been looking at him.  “Enjoyable?  Not unpleasant?”

His eyes flick towards everyone inside.  “It is not always as disagreeable as it could be.”

“So you aren’t having a terrible time?”

“No.”

The music is suddenly slower and she’s not looking at Spock anymore anyway, has pulled her eyes from him so the change in tempo gives her a reason to turn from the rain and watch everyone inside with him, all of them dancing and talking and there, against the crowd, Puri with his arm around Stoyer, her hand held to his chest as he smiles down at her, both of them swaying in time to the strains of music.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asks and she doesn’t need to look at him to know that he’s watching them too.

“My toes survived completely intact, though I think I’m glad there isn’t more food here.  Puri’s rather exuberant, I don’t know if my stomach could have taken that plus a full dinner.”

“That is an apt descriptor.”

“I want to hear your version of the ectoplasm incident.”

He’s so close to her that she can feel him turn to glance at her. “On the Lexington?”

“Oh my god,” she says, her mouth pulling slightly into a smile. “Was there more than one?”

“Perhaps.”

The rain sheets down harder, a fine mist rising up from where it’s beating against the railing and the edge of the balcony, coating her back and leaving a darkened path along the back of Spock’s shoulders, hazy, shimmering droplets hanging onto the fabric.

“Do all officers get up to that much trouble?” she asks.  “Or do the two of you take the cake?”

“You seem overly fixated on baked goods tonight.”

“Just trying to imagine life as a very professional, very accomplished Starfleet officer, protecting the Federation and promoting peace in the Alpha Quadrant.”

“You are already accomplished.”

She laughs at that even though she shouldn’t, not with how serious he sounds, but she can’t help herself, her hand gesturing towards everyone inside, their ranks, their stories, their resumes that they probably have to edit down to fit onto one filmplast, not rework the language over and over to expand it so that the page doesn’t seem quite so empty.  She tries to imagine Spock’s, probably long enough to fill a padd, and Puri’s too, and what hers will have to be like to ever be up there with them.

“You know what I mean,” she says, and when he shakes his head, she just gestures again to the officers dancing and talking and some of them laughing with a camaraderie that feels easier to take in standing next to the rain and with the breeze fluttering past her, rather than in the midst of them all.

“I apologize for leaving you alone.”

“It’s no problem,” she says lightly, quickly, hearing her voice sound steady even as her thoughts wend and wind back to what Puri said.

“It remains that you asked that I be of assistance to you.”

“I did?  In what, finding dinner?  Cause I will say that I’m with Puri and Hill on this,” she says, thinking that she’ll likely be submitting an application to the Captain someday, a neatly written cover letter on why she’d like to serve under her command and what she’ll bring to the position.  “It was a pretty poor showing.”

“In the car on the way to Mojave,” he corrects and she pulls her attention from the crowd, feeling her forehead knit as she tries to land on what he’s saying.  “Regarding such social situations as these.  I do not want you to think that I have overlooked such now.”

“I did,” she says as she remembers, that drive and that conversation floating back to her in a rush of heat and desert air, shorts instead of her dress and sandals instead of her heels, all that time they spent together before he ever left, before she ever thought that they might really get those dilithium crystals, back when the semester seemed so achingly far away from the long hot days of summer.  “You can let Barnett know that for the next time he wants to steal you away.”

“I will be sure to,” he says and when he turns to her, his eyes are so warm that she has trouble not smiling.

“That was so long ago,” she says as his eyes hold hers.  “That trip to Pike’s.”

“It was.”

There’s a part of her that would suggest that they go back inside, that they find someone to talk to, a part that wants to remember along with the echo of the sound of music playing through the speaker’s of Spock’s car that socializing with officers was what she had wanted so badly, a big reason that she had ever done any of this in the first place, that day she walked into his office, her stomach in knots.

A bigger part of her doesn’t want to be greeted as ‘cadet’ and doesn’t want to have to try to remember to add ‘sir’ to every sentence and wants to nudge Spock into trying h’ors d'oeuvres without the chance that everyone who passes by them will leave her feeling a step behind in any conversation that they might strike up.

“You talked to Commander Ho,” she says, thinking of the desert passing by the car windows, the hot heat of that day in the car.

“Before that trip?  I told you that I did.”

“I remember,” she says, watching the water coursing down beyond the balcony, wanting to think about that weekend they spent together, and to talk about it, relive what seems like so far away now and so distant, but her thoughts instead land on what the officers had just been talking about.  “But recently, too, about the tutorials, what I said about them.”

“Is that not what you wanted?” he asks, his head tipping slightly to the side in that way that he has that’s so familiar to her now.

“It was.  It is,” she says, dropping his gaze to look back at the mass of people inside, partners spinning and moving with the music and everyone else standing in small groups and clusters, the room lit up and bright.

Engstrom and Irani are at the edge of the crowd, both of them holding drinks and laughing at something that Nyota has no chance of hearing over the music and the roar of conversation.

She presses her lips together, still watching them.  “I think I’ve spoken to Irani outside of class maybe once.”

“She can be quite opinionated.”

“No, I know but she was - it was ok.  She was polite about it.  Affable,” she adds since Spock will appreciate the specificity.  She lets out a breath and makes herself look elsewhere in the crowd.  “Thank you for doing that.”  

“It was logical.”

“It was sweet of you.”

“It was of no-“

“No,” she says, reaching out like she’s going to touch him, though she doesn’t, just lets her hand hang in the air before she drops it back to her side.  “Really, thank you.  That was- I really appreciate that you did that.”

“You are welcome,” he says, his eyes following her movements as she rubs her fingers against her thumb and then grips her own wrist with her hand, her skin prickling under his gaze.  

“It was good to have something to talk to them about,” she says, her thumbnail digging into her skin before she relaxes her fingers.  “Rather than-“ She lifts one shoulder in a shrug, unsure that she wants to think about how it might have gone without that topic between them.  “It was nice.”

“You were more loquacious tonight than you were last week.”

“Is that a polite way of telling me that I talk too much?”

“The absence of such was notable,” he says and his attention is trained on her hands still so she can’t see whether or not there’s that shine in his eyes when he’s joking.

“You can just tell me that,” she says and he must not mean that because he doesn’t call her overly voluble or verbose or any of the other words that he could have dragged out of that vocabulary of his.  “I didn’t have much to say the other night.”

“You were uncomfortable,” he says, his head coming up.

“You know that I always like spending time with Puri and Stoyer.”

“Arlene,” he corrects.  “And that is not what I was referring to.”

“I know,” she says and then nearly points out that he was uncomfortable too, and then doesn’t.  “It’s fine.  Everyone - they’re nice, they’re fine.”  She looks inside again, at all of them there, dressed up and enjoying themselves, thinks of getting ready herself, brushing her hair and steeling herself for the evening.  “I just didn’t know they’d be there last week.”

“I did not either.”

She nods, knowing that he probably wouldn’t have come to the bar, and if he hadn’t come she would have left, would have made some excuse and said goodnight and gone to find Gaila or gone home by herself, to very likely fall into bed before Kirk could have a chance to come back.

“It wasn’t that bad,” she says because it’s not like it was nice or fun or what she wanted to have happen, entirely different than had it just been the four of them, but it wasn’t terrible and she had the chance to leave and she hadn’t, and she’s here now, so she tries for another smile, one that comes slightly easier this time.  “And it’s nothing that I can’t handle.”

“You are eminently resilient,” he says and she’s about to laugh and thank him when he draws in a breath and says, “I am not certain that I have sufficiently conveyed my regard for the ease that you have in such situations and that while it is a skill that is a necessity for the success of your career and one which is perhaps then not unexpected that you would be proficient at, it is remarkable that it is so inherent in your character as to be exercised in your personal pursuits as well.”

Pleonastic, she thinks, and does reach for him this time, his arm hard and tight through the fabric of his uniform.

“I don’t know how much easier I make it,” she says, thinking of the way everyone’s eyes followed her, the way their attention flicked back and forth between her and Spock.  His presence might have been notable in its rarity that night and in his position tonight, but she’s nearly - or completely, really - sure that her own was unprecedented, the reason for traded, knowing glances.

“You do,” he says.  “It was preferable.  Very much so.”

“Well,” she says, her fingers tightening over his arm, his muscles tense and knotted so that she can’t help but rub her thumb into the firm curve of his bicep, the softer spot on the inside of his elbow that gives a little under her touch.  “You’re welcome.”

The corner of his mouth twitches and his eyes are so bright that it’s not just the lights of the party playing over them but something else entirely.  “I did not thank you.”

She smiles back at him.  “Yes you did.”

“I did not.”

“I heard you,” she says.  She lets her hand come up, touches his chest, his shoulder, adjusts his collar where it sits against his neck, his skin hot against the back of her fingers.  “You don’t have to say it.”

“It is very much appreciated that you came tonight,” he says anyway, his neck moving against her knuckles as he speaks since she hasn’t moved her hand away yet and doesn’t really want to, not with the way his voice rumbles against her skin.

She tries to think of what it might have been like for him if she hadn’t, if he were here alone, too quiet on the edge of each conversation, reserved even when Stoyer and Pike and Ho and everyone else tried to engage with him, his hands gripped together in what she’s sure is an effort to take up less space, to likely try to go unnoticed in a crowd even when he’s taller than most others, so composed that he’s nothing but distinctive.

“Of course,” she says, a jump in her chest.  Or her stomach, maybe.  Somewhere in there, rapid and quick, picking up a faster patter as his eyes trace over hers, as she thinks of all that time when he was gone, so incredibly far away, and so close now.  “It’s… Of course I’m here.  It’s inconsequential.  Of no consequence.”

She shakes her head, feels her earring catch in her hair and reaches up to pull it free with the hand that isn’t still hooked into his collar, smoothing her hair back behind her.

“Of course I came,” she says again, softer, and he catches a strand of hair that she missed, tucks it back behind her shoulder, his fingers light through the fabric of her dress so that it’s easy enough to let the press of his hand there move her into him.

She lets herself enjoy that warmth she always feels when she’s close to him, that headiness of his presence and that slightly shaky, slightly dizzying pitch in her stomach whenever he touches her, that calmness about him that always seeps into her, envelops and encompasses her like nothing she would have ever thought she might feel around him, that peace that settles down deep inside.

“Come here,” she whispers and curves her fingers around the nape of his neck, takes his other hand, the one that’s not still resting on her back, in her own and leans back just enough that she can look at him, really look at him and how he’s looking back at her.

She pulls at him as she takes a step behind her and then nudges him so that he shifts with her to the side, his eyes dropping to their feet when she presses forward so that he has to move backwards.

“You haven’t done this before” she says, her words nearly lost to the pounding drum of the rain around them and the music that floats towards them from inside.

He adjusts his hand in hers as they move to the side again, and then he guides her back a step, her fingers tingling where they touch his.

“I have not.”

“You’re doing a good job,” she tells him, smiles at him and squeezes the back of his neck, his hair soft when she runs her fingers over it.

“You are an excellent teacher,” he says as she lifts their joined hands up, spins under them, cold without his touch until she’s back against him again, closer this time, his body brushing up against hers as they move together.

Inside, someone laughs and she doesn’t look because she’d have to take her eyes off of his and doesn’t turn to try to see because she might dislodge his hands and doesn’t stop moving with him because he’s drawing her forward and then to the side again and it’s better than anything to listen to the strains of music and finger the edge of his collar, press her thumb against the side of his neck.

His eyes do shift away from hers and then back and she thinks of asking who he was looking at but instead lets him spin her around again, the motion making her smile as he shifts her back into him.

“I wish it had just been us,” she says to him, barely above a whisper.  “Last week, that it had only been us and Puri and Stoyer.”

“Arlene,” he says again and she huffs a quiet laugh into his shoulder, squeezes his fingers.

“Precisely,” she says and decides to ignore everyone inside as they shift so she’s facing the rest of the party, focusing on him rather than all of those officers that are so much older than her and further along in their careers.

Spock doesn’t fit in either, anywhere, and she’ll earn her commission someday and he’ll still be there, too quiet on the edge of a party, to reserved in the company of others, and what she’s sure is too effusive and unrestrained among Vulcans.  She holds him tighter, sure her fingers are digging into his neck though he doesn’t seem to mind, his hand drifting over her dress until it rests on bare skin, warm and light until her entire back buzzes with his touch.

“I’m glad you didn’t say anything to Puri,” she whispers, letting her forehead come to rest against his cheek.  “On the ship.  When he asked about us.”

He doesn’t say that he doesn’t understand, and doesn’t ask her to explain further and doesn’t request that she clarify what she means, just asks, “You are?”

She pulls back enough to look at him, her chest full of that soft ache she carries for him more often than not, the one that has started to grow as familiar to her as that look in his eyes as he watches her.  “I am.”

“Nyota,” he says and she likes how he says her name like that, likes how she can feel it in her own chest when he speaks.  “If you would have me explain to him-“

“No,” she says, quick and louder than she meant to.

“You are certain.”

She nods, once, firmly.  “Yes.”

He pulls her closer, close enough that it’s easy to tuck herself into him, his lips brushing against her temple as he says something too soft for her to hear, lost as it is in the music rising up around them.


	35. Chapter 35

“Let’s go,” she suggests when a group of ensigns join them on the balcony, their faces flushed from dancing and their voices too loud.

“Now?” he asks as if he didn’t hear her, as if the space between them was suddenly too much for her words to travel, but he did hear because he immediately asks, “Why?  Is it not too early?”

“It is,” she agrees, trying to look through the crowd inside for the nearest door.  “But do you really want to stay?”

He doesn’t, she knows, since he’s already following her inside.  “Go where?”

“Not here,” she answers and when she keeps walking he trails after her, his boots a steady rhythm behind her as she cuts through the crowd.

When they slip outside, it’s still raining, heavy drops that splash up onto her toes and leave the straps of her shoes rubbing wet against her feet, so that the first thing that she does when she gets into his car is slip them off and toss them into the backseat, only then combing her fingers through her hair to smooth out where it’s been dampened.

The way he turns up the heat helps, warm air gushing out of the vents so that maybe the splatters of water dotting her dress will start to dry, or maybe the windows will just fog up like they are, a haze already edging up the glass and obscuring the parking lot from view and the building beyond it, where silhouetted against the windows, officers are still drinking and talking and dancing.

“Is it acceptable to leave so soon?” Spock asks, looking past her out the window.  She steals a moment to just take him in, his eyes tracing back and forth, focused on the lights of the party like he can pick out an answer.

“Nobody’ll notice,” she promises and hopes she’s right.  Who knows who was there and who wanted to talk to Spock, and what they might be missing, some admiral or captain with whom a conversation might have opened up an opportunity for either of them.  There’s a part of her that would go back, but there’s a larger part that wants to reach down and rub at her foot, so that’s what she does, folding her leg up and digging her thumbs into where the strap cut across her toe.

“This isn’t some horrible Vulcan taboo, is it?” she asks because she really doesn’t want to stop, but his eyebrow is raised and he’s now looking at her, not out the window any more.

“No.”

“Good.”

“How will you walk back to your dorm?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“That is-“

“-Illogical?”

“Footwear exists for a reason.”

“I’ll tell you what is really illogical,” she says.  “The fact that there wasn’t dinner.  How many mini quiches is a person expected to eat?”

“If that was not a rhetorical question, I would have to inform you that I am not certain as to the answer,” he says as he reaches out and adjusts the heat, turning the fan down but not lowering the temperature, even though the car is beginning to warm to the degree that it reminds her of the heat of his quarters.  “Which were the quiches?”

“The egg one, with the crust.”

“My mother called that yu’murlar.”

“You had eggs on Vulcan?”

“Not from chickens.”

“Huh.”  She lets her foot slide back to the floor, flexing her toes against it and working them this way and that.  

The hard sheets of water sliding over the car and the fog creeping up the windows makes it harder and harder to see everyone else still at the party, so that it feels like she and Spock are very much alone, no matter how many people might be walking past them right then, on their way to their own cars or for the unlucky few, the bus stop that has a connection to campus and the rest of the city.

It makes her want to ask if he’s going to turn on the car so that they too can leave, but she doesn’t find herself actually voicing that since it will mean driving back, their evening drawing to an end.  Instead, she just watches him as he makes another adjustment to the heater, how his gray cuff lays against his wrist and how carefully he holds himself so that his uniform probably still doesn’t have a wrinkle on it.

“I did not realize that the food was so dissatisfying,” he says into the silence, his hand still on the knob of the environmental controls.

“It wasn’t, it was delicious,” she says.  “But it wasn’t dinner, dinner.”

“I do not understand.”

“An actual meal.”

“When amalgamated, the various choices likely provided the same number of calories and a comparable amount of nutrition.”

“But it’s not the same as sitting down at a table.”

He doesn’t seem to know what to say to that and she would explain more but someone does walk by right then, close enough that she can make out the sound of voices and their shadow over the car and then Spock is putting on his seatbelt and there doesn’t seem anything for it but to do the same.

He drives slowly on the way back, which she chalks up to the rain and the traffic around HQ, so that it takes longer to begin to reach the outskirts of campus than the drive seemed to earlier.

It’s certainly long enough that she’s beginning to think more seriously about the quiches and especially about those crab cakes Olson was eating and is starting to wish she had more of both when the light changes a few cars in front of them and Spock slows even further, the rain suddenly louder as the car comes to a stop.

“I think there should be some regulation against dragging officers to something like that and not properly feeding them,” she says, leaning her head against the window and staring at the water coursing down, the restaurants and shops lining the street wavy and warped through the rain on the glass.

“Perhaps when you achieve the rank of Admiral that can be one of the policy changes you introduce.”

“You’ll have to remind me about it,” she tells him, rolling her head against the window enough to turn towards him.  “I’m so hungry my memory is probably shot.”

“I will.”

He says it so seriously that she’s looking at him and not out the windows when the light changes again, so she nearly misses the familiar pattern of lights above a shop a half a block ahead, too caught up in his tone and how he glanced at her as he said that, his eyes cutting over and then away again.

“There pull over,” she says, leaning forward against her seatbelt and pointing until he slows the car and edges towards the side of the road.  “There’s a spot.”

“What are we doing?” he asks as he pulls into it.

“Not going home quite yet,” she explains, thinking only of her dorm and the homework waiting for her there, held against another few minutes being out for the night, alone with him and away from everyone at the party.

“I do not-“

“Stay here,” she instructs as she opens the door and examines the rain streaming down, her skirt fisted in one hand.

“You are not wearing shoes.”

“I am aware,” she tells him, then gets out and shuts the door before the cold, hard rain can blow inside.  She jogs over to the door of the pizza place that Gaila loves, the one she brings slices back from after long nights out at bars and clubs, so that more than once Nyota has woken up to empty containers and stained napkins on the floor of her room.

“I do not understand you,” he says when she gets back, though he reaches over and takes the bag from her so that she can get into the car quickly, only slightly soaked.

“Turn up the heat,” she says.  “And give that back, I’m starving.”

He does both, raising the temperature and letting her take the bag from him, that eyebrow of his raised as she pulls the bag from his hands.  She lifts out the container she got for herself and opens it, letting herself just stare down at the pizza for a moment before carefully sliding her fingers under it.  It’s hot, nearly too much so, her fingers smarting with runny grease and cheese melting onto her hand and back into the container in messy, wet globs, but she can barely care because it just tastes so, so good.

“This is not a meal either,” he says as she closes her eyes and chews slowly, savoring the salt and the truly, truly delicious, too warm cheese, so different than what’s served in the mess hall each day, and such a far cry from what she normally eats.  It’s not a normal night, though, not full of textbooks and notes, or the company of other cadets and she takes another bite, and then another.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

“You yourself said that a table is necessary to qualify the act of eating as a meal.”

“Try it,” she instructs.

“No.”

“You haven’t eaten all night.”

“That is not nutritious.”

“That’s the point.”

“Consuming foods which are high in-“

“-I got you a salad, but you can’t have it until you’ve had a bite of this.”

“You did?”

“I did.”

He’s eyeing the bag at her feet and she wants to say something about how she wasn’t going to not bring him food too, but doesn’t because his head is tipping slightly to the side and there’s something around his eyes that she’s too busy studying, before he looks up at her again and then she’s examining her pizza instead of staring back at him in the small space.  “It remains that pizza is illogical.”

“Too bad,” she says, toeing the bag slightly further away from him, so that it’s resting between her leg and the car door.  “Because really, it remains that I’ve been informed that I’m incredibly stubborn so the rational decision would be to capitulate now.”

He’s just staring at the piece held in her hand and doesn’t move other than to let one of his eyebrows creep up again, a sight that makes her chest slightly tight.  She ignores it, pushes that feeling back down until she’s more sure that the pull in her, that tension, has ebbed and eased and is largely gone.  It’s probably too much for him, too abnormal and too human and too messy, especially in his car that he keeps so clean, and especially after a night out among so many officers, enough of a departure from the norm for her and so much more jarring for him that he likely wants to get back home and shrug off everything Terran and so foreign in the peace of his quarters.  Or the ship, she reminds herself, even further away from everything that has always made him so uneasy about being on Earth.  

Instead of holding the pizza out to him and trying to get him to eat it with more convincing and maybe a smile, she makes herself shrug.  “It’s fine,” she says, trying for something casual with her tone, something light and like she doesn’t care.  “More for me.”

She’s taken another bite, the pizza slightly cooler this time around when she sees him nod out of the corner of her eye, feels him still watching her.

“Very well.”

“Very well?” she asks, warmth spreading through her chest so that she has to swallow so that she can keep smiling.  “I don’t know, your chance might be up.  Forfeited for lack of enthusiasm.”

“That was not stated in your previous conditions.”

“I’ll allow it this time,” she says and then his hand is hot around her wrist, and he’s leaning over and taking the absolute smallest bite that she’s ever seen.  “Come on, that was nothing.”

“Inaccurate,” he says as he swallows.

“No, that was the least committed bite of pizza ever.”

“That cannot be ascertained without conducting a thorough study and reviewing pertinent historical documents.”

“Intuition,” she promises.  “I just know.”

“Insufficient scientific rigor,” he says, reaching over her lap for the bag that’s resting against her leg so that she has to pull her pizza out of the way, her body crowded back against the seat by his until his warmth is suddenly gone again, his salad in his hand and the sound of him opening the container filling the car.

“Thank you,” he says, his fork still poised above the greens which are really a poor substitute for even what’s served in the mess hall.

“Just don’t go asking for my crust,” she says, then leans over and snags a tomato out of the container with her fingers, pops it into her mouth before he reacts.

He finishes before she does, because she only eats pizza every so often and it’s something to be enjoyed, and because he was definitely hungry, eating in a way that reminds her of that first night she was ever in his apartment, bowls of soup on the table in front of him and his appetite suddenly making an appearance after all of those meals they had shared where he had barely picked at his food.  

“Any other necessary stops?” he asks as he starts the car again.

“No, but I’ll let you know if I think of any.”

“Do you require more time?” he asks as she slowly takes a bite of her crust.

“Just enjoying myself,” she says.

He parks where he did earlier, in that spot in the lot as close to her dorm as he can get and she thinks about another night and hazy mid summer air.

“It’s supposed to do this into tomorrow?” she asks as she stares out the window, the entrance to her dorm mostly obscured by the rain beating down so that she can barely make out the steps that lead up to the dorm.  A Tellarite second year who lives two floors up from her room jogs up them, his head ducked against the rain and then he’s gone inside the lobby, the doors sliding shut behind him.

“Rain?  I believe so.”

“Do you like it?” she asks, watching him watch the rain sliding down the windshield.

“I find it intriguing, though admittedly more so when I first arrived on Earth.”

“Does it ever rain on Vulcan?”

“Rarely, especially where I was raised, and never like this.”

“I wonder if your mother misses it,” she says, joining in him in watching the slide of water coursing over the glass.  “I think I would, if I lived somewhere so dry.”

“That is a common complaint of those who served extended time on ships, especially officers who do not have an opportunity to assist with away teams.”

“I guess I never thought of that,” she says, thinking of the Enterprise up above them, the handful of times that trainings have taken her up to Spacedock and the cool, recycled air.

“Do you have a significant amount of homework to complete this weekend?” he asks and maybe that’s a reason to get up and out of his car, but she doesn’t move to do so.

“Just getting ready for midterms,” she says, which he knows of course.  “I don’t think Cretek was kidding about having a lot in store for us, based on the readings she assigned for next week.”

“You continue to enjoy her class?”

“It’s ok.”  She watches a stream of water form on the edge of the windshield and run down it, out of sight.  “Not as good as a parrises squares match.”

“You are an enthusiast?”

“Not like Ho is, apparently.” She shakes her head lightly, still watching that trickle of water, joined now by another rivulet flowing towards it.  “You’re working again this weekend?”

“I am.”

“Tonight?” she asks, already sure of his answer.

“Yes.”

“Pot.  Kettle,” she says, pushing lightly at the dashboard in front of her, her fingers braced against it before she drops her hand.  “Sorry, that means that you’re telling me to-”

“I am familiar with the phrase.”  He adjusts his seat belt over his chest and shifts slightly.  “It was an often used utterance between my parents.”

“Hypocrisy should be illogical.”

“One would think.”

“Well, you’re missing your big chance to go to the game,” she says, running her thumb under the strap of her own seatbelt but not moving to unlatch it.  “Unless parrises squares was on your checklist of things to do on Earth when you got here?”

“No,” he says and she shouldn’t be surprised, since she can’t really imagine him enjoying himself at a game like that, no matter how much Ho wanted him to go.  Cretek too.  

She watches rain fall into a puddle on the sidewalk, the drops splashing up each time they hit the surface, over and over again, little jumps of water that make tiny leaps towards the sky.

“My father took me to a match,” Spock says in the quiet.

“Really,” she says, turning back towards him.

“I was twelve.  I believe it was intended as a relationship building experience.”

“Intended?”

“It was not ever repeated.  I am not certain it was entirely successful.”

She lets herself lean slightly towards him and doesn’t try too hard to tell herself to move back away again.  “Did you enjoy it?”

“It was certainly interesting.”

“He liked my paper,” she says and smiles, just a little.  “Found it logical.  Compelling, I think he said.”

“You spoke?” he asks and seems to be unable to quite mask the surprise that briefly colors his expression.

“He sent me a message.  It was nice.”  And strange, but she doesn’t bother telling Spock that since he seems to be thinking the same thing, his eyes flicking over at her.

“His statements are factual.”

“And nice,” she repeats.

“Accurate.”

“Sweet of him,” she says just to see if she can get Spock to smile.  

“That is not a descriptor that has ever been used in reference to my father.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says, thinking of what Spock must have been like when he was twelve, trying to imagine it and keep at bay the smile that’s threatening.  The expression on his face, that particular blankness that he carries, is enough to prevent her smile from blooming, so that instead she just adjusts the seatbelt across her chest.  “I’m sorry you two aren’t close.”

“There is nothing for you to apologize for.”

“Regardless,” she says.

He watches the rain tick down, drop after drop falling onto the windshield in front of them in an endless beat until he ducks his head and examines what she’s guessing is an overly interesting spot on his slacks.

“Thank you.”

She gives him a gentle smile even though he’s not looking.  “What is it that I say next?  That there’s no thanks necessary?”

He blinks and something about him eases, his fingers swiping over the spot on his pants he was staring at as his head comes up.  “I believe the appropriate response, then, is the utterance of ‘still’ which has no significant or substantial meaning, and yet this fact does not stop humans from over using the statement.”

“I never said we were logical,” she tells him.  “What game was it?  That he took you to?”

“The Terran team was playing Andor.”

“Was Puri there?  Did you two run off and hijack the scoreboard? I can just imagine it now, you furiously coding, Puri coming up with things to write up there.”

“A missed opportunity, to be sure.  Perhaps it would be wise to not mention it to the Doctor.  I am uncertain he would be able to refrain from carrying out such an idea, even as an adult.”

“Him or you?” she asks and Spock doesn’t answer but she catches how his mouth twitches before he turns to look out his window to hide it.

“Have you been to one?” he asks.

“A game?  Yes, but there’s really no sense in going again if we aren’t going to get Puri to agree to such antics,” she says.  Spock isn’t going tomorrow night anyway so she can smile to herself at the thought and ignore the fact that it will only be a thought, something to imagine and picture in her own mind, that there won’t be an opportunity to let Puri know exactly what they’ve been talking about.

“You did not enjoy yourself?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head.  “Anything would have been an improvement, even parties with no real food.”

“The Terran team was unsuccessful?”

“No, no, I went with this guy,” she says before she’s really decided if that’s something she wants to tell him, and then squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head again at the memory, thinking that she needn’t have shared that.  “It was terrible.”

The rhythmic fall of rain fills the car again and she finds herself picking at the arm rest on the door, running her nails over it again and again so that she has to make herself stop before she leaves any lasting mark there, marring the pristine interior of Spock’s car.

“It was fine,” she corrects because it wasn’t really that horrible, not compared to other situations over the years.

“Did he wear his uniform?”

“What?” she asks, shifting so she’s facing him again.  “No, why?”

“I have been informed that such attire is inappropriate for those types of circumstances.”

She finds herself laughing at that, her hand falling away from the arm rest.  “Thankfully he didn’t, though I wouldn’t have put it past him.”

“Perhaps he would have benefited from your guidance.”

“Not deserving of it, trust me,” she says, hearing the note in her own voice, the strength of her words surprising to her.  She runs her teeth over her bottom lip, bites at it, and sighs.  “I thought… I don’t know what I thought.  That he’d be more interesting than a brick wall and had better manners.  Turns out I was wrong on both counts.”  

She adjusts her skirt over her lap, touches a damp spot that has yet to completely dry as she waits for Spock to say something, though he doesn’t.

When he keeps silent, she adds, “It was a long time ago.  My first semester here.”

“You did not repeat the experience?”

“Stop it with the inquisition,” she says, letting go of the fold of her skirt she finds that she picked up and was rubbing between her fingers so that she can nudge his arm with her knuckles, the fabric of his dress grays soft and warm.  “And no, I didn’t.”

“I am simply curious,” he says, which she knew but there’s something else there in the way he looks away from her, something that makes her duck forward and try to catch his eye again.  

“What, you’re not going to share your own wayward adventures?” she asks even though she knows the answer, knows that whatever it was that passed between him and T’Pring did so recently enough that it left little time between the end of it and the beginning of the summer and sitting here now, months later, the rain beating down, alone with him in his car, she finds she’s maybe ok with not knowing what transpired in those few weeks, if anything did at all.  Unlikely, she thinks, remembering him back then.  But possible maybe, which is fine.  Really fine.  Very much none of her business.  

“Cretek has a thing for you,” she says before she can stop herself then wants to cover her face with her hands or maybe just step out into the rain like it could wash away the moment or perhaps ask him if there’s anyway he can possibly, with that perfect memory of his, forget that she said that.  “Sorry, sorry, I-“

“She has said as much.”

“Right.”  She unfastens her seatbelt, reaches into the backseat for her shoes, hooking the straps over her fingers and not looking at him.  “It’s-“

“Would you like to-“

“What?” she asks when he doesn’t continue, and when he stays silent she tightens her grip on her shoes.  “I’m sorry I said that, it was- I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

He nods, still watching her and she reaches for the door handle, her cheeks flushed too warm for it to be from the heat of the car.  

“Goodnight,” she says.

“Nyota it is not-“

“No, it’s fine,” she says, firmly so that she can hear how much she means it, her words strong enough to counterbalance the heat creeping down from her face to settle inside of her chest.  “It’s like I said, right?  Half of the Academy?  Of Starfleet?  More?”  She gestures to that jacket on him and if she could, she would point to that dry humor of his, the list of everything he’s accomplished in his few years out of the Academy, that kindness that seems fundamental to him so that he’s probably the most decent and thoughtful person she’s ever met, but she can only point again to his dress grays and that’s not really sufficient to explain everything that there is about him so she lets her hand fall back into her lap.  “You could have been there with anyone tonight.”

The fall of the rain patters down around them, a steady staccato that batters his car, obscuring the world through the windows so that it’s just the two of them, the air between them warm and weighted, until he draws in a breath and says,  “I was not.”

“No,” she nods, tugs at her skirt.  “You weren’t.”

The rain starts to course down harder, the sound of it picking up and the patter swelling into a drum on the roof of the car, the parking lot around them washed out in a stream of water gushing down the windshield.

“You give the impression that such would be straightforward,” he says and she wonders if she’s supposed to hear him over the beating of the rain, or if his voice is pitched low like that so that she’s welcome to ignore it if she wants to, to let his words slide past her, out into the darkness of the night beyond them.  “I have not found that to be the case.”

“No,” she says again, and nods once more for good measure, her fingers still picking over the folds of her skirt.  It’s anything but simple, and he’s anything but uncomplicated, a jumble of a shaken up puzzle wrapped up inside of a person, the pieces of him difficult to pick through, to make sense of and to see clearly except in snatched moments here and there.

She’s getting better, she thinks, at noticing, at taking in everything about him, all those different facets and irregular components of him that shine through now and again.

Mercurial, she thinks, utterly and painfully and wonderfully one of a kind.

“I wish it was,” she hears herself say.

She watches his lips move over words, ones she thinks are in agreement, but she can’t hear them over the pound of the rain or maybe it’s her own pulse, a batter of sound that drowns out what he said until he pulls in a breath, his forehead knitting together.  “Nyota, over the course of the summer you harbored significant concern regarding the course of your career and if the Lieutenant or another officer has said or suggested that-“

“No,” she says, much louder, cutting him off so that his eyes snap over to her and then away again, his attention centered on the dashboard.  She helps him stare at it, sure that they can bore right through it.  “I don’t.  It’s ok.”

“You are certain?”

“Yes,” she says.

It’s fine, she starts to say again except that the jab of nerves that she’s carried with her since the other night with all of the officers and very likely from before that, from over the summer when everyone would look between her and Spock and form their own ideas, spoken only in small smiles and that flick of their eyes from him to her and back again - all of that has been bubbling and building in her for so long so that instead of telling him that it’s really, really ok, she finds her free hand fluttering in her lap, refusing to stay still and her attention shifting to glue itself to the water sheeting down the window.

“She-” she starts, then reaches down to adjust the bag by her feet where it’s threatening to tip over so that empty napkins and the salad container might spill all over the floor of the car, because she’s not going to say Cretek’s name again.  “Everyone, Ho too, I mean, and the Admiral and-” She gets out a laugh that sounds half mangled, a rather wild version of what she was going for as she picks at the edge of the bag.  “They think we’re…”

Whatever it is that they were doing over the summer.  She adjusts her grip on her shoes, presses her lips together and looks up at him, feeling a catch in her throat as she swallows, and a jump slightly below it, somewhere in her chest or stomach or maybe just everywhere, the entirety of her feeling flighty and fluttery and like the car isn’t nearly enough room to contain all of this, that throb in her stomach that started sometime last summer and has never even begun to ebb.

“I am aware.”

“Right.”

She could reach for the door handle right then, her shoes still caught over her fingers and her dorm right there, so close to where they’re sitting, though she’s sure that if she does, life will jolt back into action, that this pause, this stilling and slowing of the evening that they’ve created will be punctured in a wet strike of rain on her skin and they won’t get back here, to the quiet and calm of the small space of the car around them.

“I didn’t go out again with that guy or really anyone else until this summer,” she says, her fingers twisting around the straps of her shoes.

“You did not.”

“No,” she says, then drags a smile out of herself, aims it down at her lap and breathes out something that might be another laugh, one towards herself or towards him or maybe - probably - towards them both together.  “I guess I was apparently waiting around for the most horribly awkward cup of tea that anyone has ever had.”

“If it was so unique, it is fortunate that I was on hand to experience it as well,” he says with all of his normal gravity, that seriousness and sternness that clings to him and which makes her smile, makes it grow wider and tug at her mouth until she can catch his eye and see that light in them, that shine that she sometimes thinks she could spend days studying.  

He adjusts the heat, then smooths the front of his jacket, then tucks his hands together in his lap and says, “I understand that your first experience with the sport might preclude future interest.  However if you do wish to attend the game tomorrow night, I would be amenable.”

“Oh,” she says, an odd rush draining out of her, leaving her closing her mouth which she didn’t realize was parted and rubbing her palm quick over her thighs.  She doesn’t think he wants to go, not really.  And she has a lot of work.  A lot, a lot of work.  She’s nodding anyway, and asking, “Don’t you have to be up on the ship?”

“Not all evening.”

“Ok.”

“Is than an acceptance?”

“Yes?” she asks and when his eyes fall to her mouth, she realizes that she’s been smiling.

“I believe it is incumbent upon myself to remind you that you repeatedly informed me that my own manners were severely lacking.”

“You drove me home,” she points out, of all the things she could say to that, that thought rising to the top of everything he’s done for her.  “And yes, I do want to go.  With you.”  

She unbuckles her seat belt, leans across the car, her hand rising to his cheek to turn him towards her so that she can kiss him, his lips pressing against hers gently, softly and so slow as she remains there, uncomfortable with how she’s sitting, the armrest digging into her side and barely balanced, unsteadily leaning into him.  

His fingers rest on her jaw before sliding back into her hair, cupping her head as he begins to kiss her more firmly, deeper and thorough and still painstakingly slow. The tug of his lips on hers and the soft sound he pulls out of the back of her throat as she tries to press closer to him makes her want to shove everything between them out of the way, the gearshift and the armrest and the space between their bodies until there’s nothing left but the two of them.

When he finally breaks away, their lips parting with a soft smack that’s loud in the quiet of the car, she’s still leaning against him and stays there caught up in him, unwilling to make herself move.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she whispers, feels the movement of his nod against her, his nose brushing against her own and the pull of the scent of his skin and his touch on her still, so that it’s not right then that she moves back, opens her door and steps out into the night to return to her dorm, but much later, losing herself in him in the meantime, the moments stretching elastic as she lets herself kiss him again and then again, minutes ticking past them and counted out in the patter of the rain.


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 10/11/15: Friends, we are imminently approaching the end. There’s a handful of chapters left - if you want to know how many, feel free to either ask or check out my posts cataloguing the last few weeks of writing, all under ‘the place between’ tag on my tumblr, or hang in there and wait for the trusty ‘the end’ that will follow the last chapter, which we are rapidly - and sadly, because of what an incredible journey this has been - coming up on. Happily, there’s still a bit of story left before we reach the last of it, so I hope you continue to enjoy!

“What are you doing?” Gaila asks, too loud and too close so that Nyota can’t help but jump in surprise, smearing the eyeliner she was very nearly done applying.

“Dammit Gaila,” she says, wiping at it with her knuckle and then the side of her thumb.

“You stop, your Cardassian paper doesn’t care how you look.  I know you and your homework have a close relationship but really, Ny?  This is maybe taking it a bit far.”

“Can you warn me next time so that I’m not in danger of stabbing myself in the eye?”

“Can you maybe tell me what warrants getting all dressed up?” Gaila asks.  “Or who?  Oh stop, you’re just making it worse.”

“Don’t,” Nyota says but that doesn’t keep Gaila from grabbing a tissue in one hand and Nyota’s chin in the other, turning her face up and wiping at the corner of her eye.

“Answer,” Gaila instructs, her touch far more gentle than her voice is.

“No.”

“Tell me,” she says, picking up the eyeliner again and tilting Nyota’s chin slightly to the side.  “Or I’m going to make this so slightly uneven that it will make anyone who likes precision and exactness and is a fan of things being all in order and capable of noticing when they’re not absolutely crazy.”

“I’m getting a new roommate.”

“No you’re not,” Galia corrects as Nyota feels her carefully correct what had smudged.  “You’re just finding new and more interesting places to sleep.  I can’t believe you came home last night, do Vulcans melt in the rain?  Is that their greatest weakness besides irrationality and being allergic to having fun?”

“He had work,” Nyota says, pushing Gaila away and leaning forward to inspect herself in the mirror, trying to find fault with Gaila’s application and frowning at her own reflection when she can’t.

“You two are practically made for each other with how boring you both are.”  Gaila runs her fingers through Nyota’s hair where she’s pulled it up, twisting her ponytail around green fingers and giving her a smile in the mirror.  “Except for tonight apparently.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It is so not nothing.  It is the opposite of nothing.  It is Saturday night and you are going somewhere that I am guessing is not the library.”  Gaila’s hands fall to her shoulders, straightening the collar of the shirt Nyota picked out.  “Any ambassadors going to be around?”

“You know the answer to that,” Nyota says, turning her head this way and that to examine whether Gaila messed up her hair.

“So it’s just you two?”

“Some of his…” she starts, waving a hand towards her reflection.  “Colleagues.  Coworkers.  Friends.”

“I thought he didn’t have friends.”

“I thought so too, but I think he’s just… I don’t know.  Stubborn.”

“Sounds like a real catch.”

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be right now?  Anywhere?” Nyota asks but instead of waiting to see if Gaila nods or is even going to answer, she hears her comm ring and grabs for it before Gaila can.

“Hi,” she says, then mouths ‘stop’ at Gaila who’s craning to see the ID on the small screen, her tongue caught between her teeth as she smiles.

“Nyota,” Spock says and Gaila’s smile grows only wider.

“It’s at 1930, right?” she asks turning away from Gaila and sinking onto the edge of her bed, trying and failing to ignore the dip of the mattress as Gaila sits right beside her, still smiling and now bouncing a little.  “Do you want to walk over together?”

“The central variance drive of the radiation resonance modulator needs to be rerouted to starboard electromagnetic degeneration coil.”

“What?” Nyota asks

“Did you use a secondary photonic inducer to check the phase circuit?” Gaila asks.

“Cadet?” Spock asks and Nyota elbows her, though not hard enough to get her to actually leave.

“That’s, sorry-“

“-Sorry-“ Gaila adds, looking anything but.  “Hi, I’m here too.”

There’s a pause that feels longer than it should be before Spock finally says, “Hello.”

“In class, Professor Ekoor told us to use the inducer to reconfigure the modulator,” Gaila continues, undaunted by Spock’s tone or maybe just ignoring it.  “Though she said it takes forever and someone has to stay there the entire time to monitor the calibration of the flux compensator so that - oh.”

“Nyota,” Spock says again and she tries to imagine the look he’d be giving Gaila right then, tries to picture him there instead of what sounds like up on the ship, on his comm and very likely standing near what she is increasingly willing to guess is a project that is going to last a lot longer than the time from now until 1930.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says before she can begin to think too hard about any of it, not with Gaila next to her, all too close and the smile gone from her face in a way that is making it hard for Nyota to look at her.

“I apologize.”

“Not your fault,” she tells him because it’s not.  It’s really, really not.  It’s a game that she didn’t even know was happening until last night and which she can certainly live without attending, and she can find something else to do with her evening.  A free Saturday is rare enough, so she can definitely make the most of it.

She picks at the bedspread next to her thigh, stares down at how her hand is moving against it, the tiny hole in the blanket that she’s only making worse by working her finger into it.

“I am certain that you would be welcome to accompany the others.”

“No, no, that’s not… Thank you. Them, I mean, but-“  She shakes her head even though he can’t see it, because he’s up on the ship and not with her right then, and not about to meet her.  “It’s completely fine.  Good luck with the repairs.”

He’s quiet and she doesn’t look up from her hand and Gaila doesn’t move, her stillness nearly too much for Nyota to deal with right then, when a moment ago she was making the mattress shake and before that was nearly messing up the ponytail Nyota had spent so much time on.

“Perhaps it is an opportunity for you to spend on your work,” he says and she thinks she’s supposed to smile at that.  Instead, she stands up because she can’t sit still any longer, and paces over to her dresser and then her closet and then back again, her arm wrapped over her stomach, tight around herself.

“I finished it all, actually,” she says.  She tries to laugh about that, tries to make light of it so as to loosen the hardness that has lodged deep in her chest.  “But I’ll go find that piano, or go sightseeing or something.  I hear Alcatraz is beautiful on a wet, crappy, Saturday.”

“With the bridge, I imagine that it would be.”  Yes, probably.  Lit up against the fog and the rain that has yet to cease since last night when she sat in Spock’s car with him, dry and warm and talking, time stretching in front of them unhurried, what with the promise of tonight.

She thinks she hears him sigh, if that was at all something he would do.  

“I would prefer the circumstances to be different.”

“No, no, it’s good,” she says, shifting her comm in her hand because she’s holding it too tightly and it’s making her fingers hurt.  “Because now you can never say anything about me working all the time.”

“Never?”

“Never ever,” she says, leaning her head down into her hand and closing her eyes.

“That is a very long time.”

“Get used to it.”

“I will endeavor to do so.”

The click of her comm folding closed is too loud in the quiet of the room and Nyota spends a long time listening for another noise until Gaila finally shifts slightly, and must cross the room, her fingers coming to rest lightly on Nyota’s shoulder.

“It’s fine,” she says firmly, putting her comm back on her dresser .

“Want me to go?” Gaila asks.

“No, it’s not… You don’t like parrises squares, you always complain about it.”

“I’ll give it another try.”

“You hate it,” Nyota reminds her, taking out her earrings, the ones she had finally decided on after what was really too long thinking about it.

“I wasn’t going out anyway.”

“Gaila…”

Nyota pauses in putting her earrings on her dresser to gesture to the clothes strewn across her roommate’s bed, a rumpled mess of skirts and strappy dresses and a tank top Nyota’s reasonably sure belonged to her at one point.

“I was doing laundry,” Gaila says.

Nyota feels all the things she would normally say to that sitting in the back of her throat, caught there as she imagines voicing them.  Instead, she pulls off her shirt, watches her hands fold it and slip it back into the drawer, and shimmies out of her skirt too, hanging it up next to the other ones she had thought about wearing, rejecting each of them in turn for not being the perfect choice for the evening.

“Nice bra,” Gaila finally offers.

“Please stop.”

When Nyota turns back around, Gaila’s sitting on her bed, her hands tucked under her thighs and her shoulders drawn up slightly.

She tugs on a pair of shorts as Gaila begins to clean up her clothes so neatly that it would make Nyota feel worse if she was thinking about reasons she might be feeling bad to begin with.

“Let’s do something,” Nyota says, her voice coming out slightly too loud.

“Jim downloaded that holovid that came out?  During finals last semester that none of us saw?”

“I,” Nyota says, opening the drawer that has her t-shirts in it, the soft faded ones that she’s always loved.  “Do not want to see him right now.”

“He said you two are friends now.  I thought you were.”

“Of course he did,” Nyota says and shuts the drawer too hard, the sound it makes as it thumps against the dresser only slightly dulling the memory of getting ready last night.

She pulls her ponytail out from under the collar of her shirt and then just stands there, her fingers touching the top of her dresser lightly as she stares down at her comm, the bracelet she had picked out, the two necklaces she had been thinking about wearing, one of which is all too reminiscent of Spock’s hands at the back of her neck, the warm air of summer and a different evening with what now feels like a different him.

When her comm rings, she has to fumble to get it open, one earring skittering across the top of her dresser in her hurry.

“Uhura,” Puri says and she closes her eyes, forces herself to let out the breath that she was holding.

“Hi,” she says brightly.

“You should still come.”

“You should,” she hears Stoyer say in the background and imagines them in their kitchen or their living room, somewhere in their beautiful house with its blonde wood and cheerful lighting, it’s quiet street and that hill that she and Spock walked down, Puri jogging after them with a smile on his face.

“Thank you, but-“

“I bet Arlene five credits I could get you to come,” Puri says, cutting her off.

“He did not, he’s just saying that,” Stoyer corrects.

“I would have if I didn’t think that Spock would tell me that gambling is illogical.”

“Eighty three percent of cadets play poker every week,” Nyota says, listening to how easy her voice sounds.

“We’re trying to keep you in the seventeen percent,” Stoyer says, suddenly much louder, like she must have taken the comm from Puri and Nyota think about how Puri is probably grinning, thinks about their call to her, how Spock had to have commed Puri.

“Thank you,” she repeats.  “I really appreciate it.”

“If you change your mind, just call,” Stoyer says over Puri’s continued encouragement for her to come.

“We can go get drinks,” Gaila says when Nyota folds her comm closed and puts it neatly on her dresser, lined up with the edge of it.

“Sure,” Nyota says but doesn’t move, just keeps standing there, one finger pushing at her comm until it’s askew and then righting it again.

“Shopping?  It’s early, I bet a lot of places are still open.”

“I don’t know,” she says, trying and failing to summon the excitement for something like that.

“Poker?” Gaila asks which draws a shrug out of Nyota and is apparently acquiescence enough because Gaila drops the skirt she was folding.  “We don’t have to tell your dean.”

“She’s not my dean.”

“Or your Commander.”

“Gaila.”

“Lips are sealed,” Gaila promises and she just seems so happy at the prospect that Nyota finally nods.

“I’m not really dressed,” Nyota says, looking down at herself.

“You’re fine, let’s go get McCoy.”

Getting McCoy means getting Kirk as well and Nyota lingers in the door of their room, her arms crossed over her chest and her weight on her shoulder against the doorjamb as Kirk searches for the cards.

“How was it last night?” he asks, sifting through the homework he has on his desk, texts and notes and a stylus that rolls onto the floor and McCoy bends down to pick up.

“Fine,” she says, crossing her arms tighter.

“I just had them,” he promises, shutting the last drawer in his desk and starting in on McCoy’s, leaving filmplasts and padds slightly scattered in his wake.

Nyota watches it all with without moving from the doorway, Gaila sitting crosslegged on his bed with lots of ideas of where to look and no actual help, McCoy straightening up his work after Kirk rifles through it, and Kirk standing there in the middle of the room with his hand raised to the back of his head as he looks around, his fingers scratching through his hair.

“Huh,” he finally says.

“We have some,” she says, pushing away from the door just so that she doesn’t have to stand there any longer and think about how she’ll very likely be working for him someday, up on some ship somewhere since she’s all too certain that he’ll make good on his promise of getting one of his own, very likely sooner than anyone else expects him to.

She tries to imagine it as she walks back to her room, all of them up there like Hill and Moneaux are, the promise of stars and new planets, the likes of which Spock has seen so many times already.

Now, though, it’s the reality of the padds she’s moving aside to see where Gaila squirreled away their playing cards, the texts waiting for her, and a long list of homework to complete over the coming week, no matter how much she already got done today.

The thought makes her hands still and she forces herself to keep searching because it would be all too easy to reach for her Cardassian notes which are sitting right there, or to just sit down on her bed and not grab anything, not her work and not the cards, to just be still for a few moments that she’s sure would edge into a handful more, and then even longer until she could maybe just fall asleep, no matter how early it is, make this day that started with ticking work tasks off of her list finally end, if the only other option for the evening is a night spent playing a game she has no real interest in.

She looks at her bed, still neatly made from when she woke up.  She had checked her messages not long after, finding one from Spock with details about tonight sent at 0436 and she had seriously considered calling him to let him know that he could probably stand to sleep in once in a while.

Unless that was sleeping in for him.  She has no real idea what time it is that he does get up, only that it’s consistently earlier than she does.

Not that she ever really had planned to know that.  But she does, now.  And it makes a time stamp of before 0500 bring up memories of the darkness of his apartment, the way the streetlights play over the wall and ceiling, not that he was in his apartment because he was up on the ship, where he still is, dealing with the modulator after calling her.  And calling Puri.  Who called her and danced with her last night, and last week bought her an entire night’s worth of drinks and sought her out with her friends among the crowd in the bar, and had her over for dinner at the end of the summer.

She should just go, she tells herself as she starts searching through the piles of mess on the top of Gaila’s dresser, pushing a handful of socks to the side and finding no cards under them.  She likes McCoy fine, finds Kirk somewhat tolerable and as good of a time as she’d have with Gaila, she’s not entirely sure that after a long week and being out drinking last night, and then hours of work today that she’s necessarily energetic enough for the type of conversation Gaila typically keeps up.  Watching a parrises squares match is probably simpler to sit through, and if Puri’s there he’s always easy to talk to and she wouldn’t necessarily have to try to make conversation with anyone else.  

Or, really, she should go for the very reason that the others will be there, she knows.  Who knows how many officers, captains and commanders will be going, any of them leading to what might be an assignment someday.  She’d be lucky to catch their eye and attention and tonight could be very, very much worth it to just push herself out the door.

Or she could sleep.  

Or watch that movie, or steel herself for poker, not that she can find the cards and she finally just dumps the rest of the socks on the floor, raises one hand to her forehead and rubs at it, letting out a hard breath.

No.  She’s going.  She’s going to go because that was the point of this, back at the beginning of the summer, that she would deal with the Ambassador and everything that brought because in exchange she was going to get to meet officers like Captain Hill and Captain Pike and Admiral Barnett and that is invaluable and she would be absolutely crazy to squander it.  It’d be illogical, she tells herself, and thinks that maybe she should smile at the thought, but she can’t seem to bring herself to do so.

She makes herself drop her hand and reach for her comm where it’s sitting on her dresser, thinking to call Puri back and let them know that she’ll meet them there, if it isn’t too late.

When her comm lights up in her hand, she at first thinks she pushed the wrong button and called Spock by accident, but the indicator light is wrong for that, lit up instead as an incoming call.

“Hello?” she asks as she accepts it.

“I spoke with Captain Pike.”

“Spock?”

“Are you currently occupied?” he asks and she looks back at her door, the slice of the hallways she can see outside of it that leads back towards Kirk and McCoy’s room.

“Kind of,” she says when he doesn’t respond right away, she wraps her ponytail around her hand, gives the hall another glance and says, “No, not really.”

“As the Spacedock construction crew has finalized the passive tachyon frequency inducer and the schematics for the negative multiphasic degeneration buffer have yet to arrive on the ship so that the initial stages of installation have not yet began, the vulnerability of Starfleet’s proprietary designs of universal antimatter variance drive would not then be able to be compromised.”  

“What?”

“The captain is willing to allow a dispensation to typical security requirements onboard the ship.”

“What does that mean?” she asks, feeling a flutter start up in her stomach, trying to not believe he’s saying what it is that she thinks he’s saying, and trying to tell herself that she’s just hearing what she wants to, that he didn’t just call her back again, having called Pike in the meantime because if that’s not what he’s telling her she doesn’t want to even begin to imagine it, the black of the stars and the white, white halls of the ship, and him up there waiting for her.

“If you wish, you are welcome to join me tonight.”

“Really?” she asks, her hand tightening on her hair and her entire focus trained on her comm, her knuckles nearly hurting with how hard she’s suddenly holding it, her entire body strung taut with how badly she needs to hear him repeat himself, to listen to him say what she absolutely desperately wants him to be saying.

“You are otherwise occupied,” he says and she’s shaking her head so fast she has to let go of her hair.

“No, no,” she says, and then again for good measure.  “No, I’m not, I was just - I can come.”

“You are certain?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Entirely so?”

“God, yes.  Now?  I can come now.”

“It is not entirely pleasant,” he says carefully.  “The ship remains under construction.”

“I don’t care.”

“As Olson said yesterday, the replicators are currently inoperable, though the reconfiguration process will likely be completed by morning.”

“I can grab dinner,” she says, tucking her hair back behind her shoulder and starting towards her dresser before stopping again, standing there in the middle of her room with her heart racing and her hand still too tight on her comm.  “If that’s what- I don’t know if you’ve eaten, but if not.”

“I have not.”

“Any preferences?” she asks, then shakes her head and grabs for the earrings she was just wearing.  “No, wait, no votes from you.  I’m going to bring something that you have to try.”

“Pardon?”

“Something new,” she tells him, opening her dresser and tossing clothes on her bed before starting towards her closet and then the bathroom, stepping over a pile of Gaila’s padds that are in the way of the shortest route around their room.  “And anything else while I’m at it?”

She nearly stops at the sight of her bag when she’s dropped it on her bed, at the toothbrush that’s in her hand while he thinks over his answer and she nearly asks him to clarify if tonight means overnight, except that she’s not entirely certain of how best to phrase that, not when it’s already evening and dinner is dinner and afterwards she’s very much intending on staying and can presume with a fair degree of certainty that it’s what he implied.  Except if it’s not.  

She puts her toothbrush down on her dresser, then picks it up again.  He would have specified, had it been necessary.  Probably.

“There is the matter of…” he starts but doesn’t finish his thought so she’s left there examining her toothbrush and trying to guess at what he means.

“That you only want to eat soup?” she prompts, sticking her toothbrush into her bag and piling socks and underwear on top of it before she can decide otherwise.  It’s what he meant, she’s sure.  Or nearly sure.  Sure enough to not talk herself out of it, and sure enough not to bother to ask, and sure enough to decide to not think about it too hard in case that slight nudge of uncertainty resolves itself into any louder of a voice.  “I promise I’ll get something you’ll like.”

“I do not only eat soup.”

“Your diet is ninety percent soup.  Maybe ninety four.”

“That is grossly inaccurate.”

“I’m still going to lower that percentage,” she tells him, closing her bag, the same one she took to Pike’s all those weeks ago now.  “You’re not deathly allergic to other food, right?”

“As you have seen me consume a wide variety of-“

“-Just checking.”

She’s sorting through hair ties in the bathroom when Gaila comes to find her, her ears still full of Spock saying not goodbye and not goodnight, but that he would see her soon.

“Did you find them?” Gaila asks as Nyota grabs a handful of hairpins from the sink and calls back, “No.”

“What are you doing?” Gaila asks, her hands on her hips as Nyota slips them into her bag.

“Is that place still open?” she asks as she strips off her shirt and shorts, groping through the drawers she just finished going through for her active duty uniform, the one that she leaves in the back since she only wears it every so often.  “On Baker street?”

“What place?”

“By that bookstore we went to that one time.”

“No.  Yes.  I don’t have any idea.  Where are you going?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, jamming her feet into her boots.

“You’re leaving?” Gaila asks and doesn’t move from where she’s standing in the doorway.  “Now?”

“Have a great evening,” Nyota says as she slings her bag over her shoulder.  She starts towards the door before stopping herself and going back to wrap Gaila into a hug.  “I love you, you know.”

“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me,” Gaila says with no real ire, hugging Nyota back much harder than is really necessary.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says as she steps back.  “And please don’t bet any of my belongings this time, it took forever to get my pillow back from Kirk.”

“If your alarm clock goes off at 0530 I’m finding Commander Spock’s comm ID and leaving him a very long, very drawn out and very illogical message,” Gaila yells after her, but Nyota’s already in the hallway.

“Night!” Nyota calls back, letting the door slide shut behind her and starting towards the turbo lift, then changing her mind and pushing the door open to the stairs since she can jog down them much quicker than the wait for the lift would be, each step still taking what feels like too long when the entirety of her thoughts are focused on where it is that she’s headed.


	37. Chapter 37

It is so white.

“Hi,” she says, craning to see what’s around the curve of the corridor past him.  Everything is gleaming, polished and brighter than she would have thought possible.  Clean and neat with simple, beautiful flowing lines so that she wants to reach out and touch the walls.  She nearly does, except that she catches how he’s looking at her, a tiny curl at the corner of his mouth that makes her snap her attention back to him, since the way his science blues hang on his shoulders and fall around his waist make her want to touch that, too.

She curls her thumb under the strap of her bag, though she can’t quite manage to keep her eyes similarly under control, taking in that lightness in his expression, how utterly perfect the ship is, the five feet of corridor that she’s seen so far and him right there in front of her.

“Hi,” she says again, tightening her grip on her bag so that she doesn’t find out exactly what his collarbone feels like through the fabric of his uniform.  “Thank you.”

“You are the one who has brought food that is not protein bars,” he says, reaching for the bag that’s dangling from her other fingers, his knuckles bumping hot against hers as he takes it.  “It is very much appreciated.”

“You just want to see what I brought.”

He does, opening the bag and examining the containers inside as he starts down the hallway.  She has to both remind herself to follow him so that she doesn’t just stay there, rooted to the spot and staring around herself, and also not jog ahead of him, the promise of more ship and more after that around each bend and curve of the corridor, each intersection with another hall an excuse to peek down it.

“It’s perfect,” she tells him as she catches up with him, only to fall behind a moment later as she inspects a computer terminal set into the wall, willing herself to not poke at it, sure that she should probably keep her hands behind her back like he does so much of the time, her fingers threatening to twitch with the desire to touch.

“I will inform the captain of your approval of the deck twelve, section B corridor.”

“Is that where we are?” she asks, leaving the terminal to join him where he’s waiting for her, only to sneak a look beyond him.  “What’s this?”

“What, precisely?”

“This,” she says, gesturing around towards the sudden opening they’ve come to, the corridor expanding into a wide, rounded space several decks high, surrounded by glass railings and above them, a clear dome through which she can see the stars.  “Why is this here?”

“It is architecturally aesthetically pleasing.”

“Really?”

“No,” he says as he starts across it, his footsteps echoing slightly.  “It provides greater access to various departments which improve personnel efficiency and productivity.”

“It makes it easier to walk around the ship, you mean.”

“That is what I said.”

“And it’s gorgeous,” she adds, trying to keep herself from gaping and then deciding she doesn’t care if she does, because it’s just Spock.  “Is there anyone else here?”

“It is Saturday night.”

“Don’t state the obvious,” she says, casting one more look behind her as he leads her down another hallway.  She has to pull her attention away from the walls and ceilings and floors and her examination of the shine of the tiles, the way the lights are set into the bulkheads and an access port to a Jeffries tube she wouldn’t mind getting a look into, so that she can follow him.  “Do you just get used to it?”

“This way,” he finally prompts when her feet still haven’t moved to follow him because she just wants to look more, at everything and everywhere.  “It does not logically follow that repeated exposure causes eventual indifference.”

“So no.”

“Yes.”

“Yes it’s no, or yes it’s yes.”

“You are a linguist.”

“I might become a structural engineer instead.”

“I have no doubt you will succeed admirably, if that is your wish,” he says and it takes her a beat too long to realize he’s stopped walking and is next to an open doorway, waiting for her to walk through it.  She stops just inside and it’s only his hand on her shoulder, light and warm and then gone a moment after he’s touched her, that propels her forward.

“Nice,” she finally says because she should say something with how he’s looking at her, probably waiting to either see her reaction or maybe just deciding whether she’s going to stay there all night, rooted to the floor she’s standing on just inside the door to his quarters as she looks around.  “You need to go furniture shopping.”

“That was Arlene’s reaction to Puri’s quarters as well.”

“Logical,” Nyota declares, finally stepping further into the room.  “Because there’s kind of nothing in here.”

“That is not strictly accurate,” he says as he puts the bag of food down on his desk, the only other choice other than his bed.  There’s a chair at least, pulled up to the computer terminal on the desk, but other than that the space is stripped of the belongings that make his apartment so comfortable.

The only thing that speaks at all to how his apartment is decorated is what looks like the same sheets on his bed, likely as soft as the ones he has back on Earth.

Which is really something she never thought she would know, but apparently of everything that has led her to be standing in his quarters on a Saturday evening, that is one of them.

He’s holding out his hand to her and she thinks at first she’s supposed to take it, only to realize he’s reaching for her bag.

“When are you going to move the rest of your things up here?” she asks as she hands it to him, more than a little surprised at the frayed edge of nerves she didn’t know she was carrying, and how they uncoil from a hot knot in her stomach as he sets it on the foot of his bed.

“Not for some time,” he says, which makes her nod.

“You should,” she tells him though she can’t imagine what he would actually bring any more than she can picture his apartment beginning to empty of his belongings, just that it’s too odd to see such a sparse, empty space when his apartment seems so lived in.  Maybe one of the paintings he has in his living room or even just some of his books, though she’s not sure where he would put them other than on the corner of his desk that’s being occupied by the food she brought.

“I got curry,” she says, crossing the short distance to his desk to fiddle with the the bag.  

“Thank you.”

“You’ve had it before?”

“No.”  He comes to stand at her shoulder and she feels him looking down at her hand on the top of the bag.

“Do you have time to eat?” she asks incase he needs to be in some lab or at his desk with his padd and she’s in the way of him working, taking too long to walk with him to his quarters and now taking up too much of his time.

“Another calibration is not needed until later in the evening.”

“Good,” she says, fingering the bag.  It’s so quiet with neither of them talking, none of the bustle of the Academy that she’s so used to.  She can’t hear the sounds of the city that permeated the calm of his apartment, just the slight whirring of the environmental controls and the crinkle of the bag as she picks at it.

“Do you have plates?” she asks, looking around at the empty space around them and finding only his bed, her bag, and the desk in front of them because no matter how much she tries to spot anything else at all, it’s still just those handful of objects.  “Or bowls?”

“I do not.”

“Forks?”

“No,” he says and she feels him shift slightly closer to her.  “I apologize.”

“Sorry, I should have brought something else,” she says, struck by the urge to tuck her hair back behind her ears, except that it’s still pulled up.  It’s really too quiet in his quarters and without the knowledge that anyone else is walking by in the corridor, no faint whistling of the computer or the hum of engine, everything feels unexpectedly hushed and too still.

She’s used to working with him, having padds and filmplasts spread between them, or having other people around, or at least it being a late enough hour that sleeping is a viable option.  She’s used to other things, too, but she doesn’t look over at his bed, just down at the food, a tiny tendril of steam escaping from one of the containers.

His fingers loop through the handles and then he’s moving towards the door.  She follows him back into the corridor, down a series of turns that she tries to keep track of and can’t because he’s walking a step in front of her and she needs to keep up with him and also because not only does she have a view of the ship but one of his back as well, the loose fabric of his shirt and the set of his shoulders.

He brings her by the mess hall with its banks of replicators, half of one wall stripped to the studs with wiring waiting to be installed, to get what they need and then another set of corridors as perfectly white as the rest before he’s opening another door in another wall.

“Wow.”  The room is huge, built on a far bigger scale than anywhere else in the ship she’s been so far, the back wall lined with windows that show Spacedock hanging before them, backlit by stars and other ships stationed around it.  The Hood she recognizes, and the Farragut docked next to it, and what is maybe the Antares, shuttles flying around them like bright specks.

The glass is cool under her fingertips and she thinks there’s a part of her that expects it to be far colder, something harsh and austere about the cool blues and grays of the station and the ships against the black that she should be able to feel through the glass.  

“There were tables and chairs in here as of yesterday,” Spock says from behind her and she turns away from the window to see him still just inside the door, looking around himself like he’s slightly baffled that he can’t find them, if baffled was ever a word that could be ascribed to him.  “I had thought-“

“This is perfect,” she tells him because he’s shaking his head and probably about to suggest somewhere else to go, with logical furniture and probably place settings and maybe water since she didn’t think to get anything to drink.

“This is not what I envisioned.”

“It’s perfect,” she says again, taking the bag from him and crossing back over to the bank of windows before carefully placing the containers on the floor and sitting next to them.  He follows her, standing there as she carefully dishes out rice and only sitting when she nudges his plate towards him.  “Anyway, some things are hard to predict.”

“Such as?” he asks, a crease forming between his brows as he opens the curry.

“Whether you’ll actually eat your dinner,” she says, getting up on her knees and reaching over, trying to both grab it from him and tug her skirt down further where it’s threatening to ride up.  “Give me that, you can’t be trusted.”

“Ok?” she asks after he takes a bite from what she spooned onto his plate.  When he nods she only studies him harder.  “Are you just saying that?”

“I did not speak.”

“It’s ok if you don’t like it.”

“I do.”

“You can be honest.”

“Vulcans are always honest,” he says and he’s either exercising his human half or he was telling the truth because he finishes what he served himself while she eats her own, scraping the last bit of rice from his plate without letting the fork make any noise against it.

She leans back on her hands when she finishes her own, tugging at her skirt again to cover more of her thighs.  When he stacks his own on top of it and puts their silverware on top, she thinks he’s about to stand and she’ll follow him back to the mess hall to clean up, but instead he just sets them aside, places the empty containers back in the bag and puts it next to the plates.

A shuttle streaks past, on its way back to Earth, disappearing from view as it approaches the planet.  If she cranes her neck a little she can see the edge of the glow of the atmosphere, but Spacedock takes up most of the window and she’s content to study the lights of the station and the shimmer of stars beyond it.

“I could look at this all night,” she says softly.

“That is fortunate,” he says as he crosses his legs, his back stiff and straight and yet somehow giving off the impression that he’s equally relaxed.  Something about the set of his shoulders, maybe, or the looseness of his hands in his lap.

“No Scrabble on board?”

“No.”

“Chess?”

“The set is in Doctor Puri’s quarters.  I attempt to model by example the inappropriateness of entering another’s quarters without permission.”

She lets her own lips curl up in echo of his.  “How sensible.”

“I will inform him of your opinion.  He is, apparently, in need of all the evidence I can assemble in order to convince him of such.”

“Stubborn,” she says, feeling her smile grow.

She turns back to the window, sure that she should have finished finding those cards, though she’s not sure that she can imagine Spock playing.  Maybe.  He was up for it that weekend in Mojave, that night when it was just the two of them inside Pike’s house, listening to everyone talking as they finished their dinners and drinks on the porch, until Puri had come in and she had gone to sleep.

Now, Puri isn’t here and nobody else is either and maybe that’s why Spock comes up here every weekend, a chance to be alone without being bothered for anything but work.

“Thanks,” she says again even though she already told him that.  “This is…”

She shakes her head and falls silent because she doesn’t really have the words to talk about being up here, with him, staring at Spacedock and the other ships hanging there against the black.

“I didn’t think I’d ever get to do this,” she tries again, sure that she can feel his eyes on her.

“Be on board?”

“Someday, yes,” she says, pulling her eyes from the window, the vastness of space threatening to take up all of her attention before she fixes it on him instead.  She suddenly wants to rub at her chest, right there into her breastbone like she can press back that fullness that seems to swell in her as she takes in the way the faint lights of Spacedock are playing over his face.  “But I wouldn’t have expected, or thought, that I’d get to do this now.  I could never have predicted this.”

“Likewise,” he says softly, his eyes holding hers until she has to swallow and tug at her skirt again, wipe her palms off against each other and sit up enough to cross her legs like his are, pulling the fabric of her uniform down as far as it will go.

“It’s a beautiful view,” she says because she’s not entirely sure of what else to say right then, the quiet of the ship around them and the evening stretching out now that they’ve eaten.  Those cards, she thinks again, or going into Puri’s quarters anyway to get the chess set, or continuing to sit here in silence, which is not heavy or uncomfortable, but which is threatening to linger in a way that makes her want to come up with a topic to talk about.

“There is a view of Earth from my quarters.”

“There is?” she asks, thinking that he very well might be smiling at her eagerness.

She’s still not sure that he isn’t when she stares through his window, unsure of how she missed the sight the first time.  Wonderful and stunning and larger than she thought it would be, so that once she peers out his window as close as she can press her forehead, it’s filling much of what she can see.  She’s seen it before of course, most memorable as a child from the moon, the planet a swirl of green and blue and white rising up above the horizon.  It’s better now that she has the time to just look, not strapped into a shuttle and not on her way somewhere in Spacedock, just able to stand there with her hands pressed to the glass and the warm heat of Spock a step behind her.

“It’s like a map of your wayward adolescent adventures,” she tells him, resisting the urge to press both palms and her forehead against the glass, the planet laid out below them and his warmth at her back, the thought that she’s actually here, on the ship, making her head spin every time she tries tries to actually grasp where she is and what she’s doing.

“Look,” she says, her finger tapping at the glass, that bubbly feeling that’s welling up in her coming out in the sound of her nail against the hard surface.  “Right there - oh.”

“What, specifically?” he asks, his voice closer to her than she thought he was, and then the brush of him against her back as he leans forward.

“That’s where-” she says, her finger leaving a smudge on the glass as it drops.  “Never mind, it’s - there’re clouds you can’t see it.”  

She lets her hand fall away, leans back from the glass to find him right behind her, close enough that she bumps up against him.

“Never mind,” she repeats, working her thumb over her forefinger.

“Where you are from?” he asks and he’s close enough that when she nods, she feels her hair drag across his chest.

“Mombassa,” she explains, her eyes still trained on the window and then on him when he leans past her, looking at the right place on Earth so that he must know where it is that she’s talking about, probably saw a map of the planet once and had it memorized so there’s really no sense in pointing it out.

Still.  It would have been nice to show him.

She blows out a breath, her shoulder nudging gently against his chest.  His hand rises to steady her as she begins to move away from the window again, a gentle press against her shoulder so that she stills and just stays there, staring down at the planet with him.

“Guess you don’t have that problem on Vulcan as often,” she says, thinking only of how his hand is still there, how he hasn’t dropped it yet.  “Clouds getting in the way like that.”

“Is that typical for this time of year?”

“Not unusual,” she says, lifting one shoulder in a shrug and feeling suddenly like the motion might dislodge his hand from her, but it doesn’t, he just keeps it there light against her back, and warm through her uniform.  “In early summer it’s very wet, rains all the time.”

“Which you avoided this year, then.”

“I haven’t been home in a while,” she admits.  “I’ve been working.  Which you probably could have guessed.”

“Quite likely.”

“There’s this big street fair at home every year around now.  It was last week, I think.  It’s huge, there’s so much food and there are these floats in the parade that are always gorgeous, and these dancers, and a lot of outdoor concerts.  We used to go the day before with my parents to see them setting up for it and then we’d go down to the beach and spend the rest of the evening there and you could hear all of them practicing and getting ready, and there’d be all these people everywhere, a lot of tourists and my cousins would always come, too. Anyway,” she says.  She clears her throat, suddenly aware that if she doesn’t stop herself, she’ll just keep going, telling him more than he probably would ever care to know.  She gestures towards the window, towards Earth and home and the sights and sounds and smells that she’s nearly sure that if she just looks hard enough will somehow reach her all the way up here.  “I keep meaning to go home for it again.  Before all this happens, if it does.”

She taps on the bulkhead where it meets the window, a shallow, sloped sill that just makes her think of the worn wood of her parent’s house, nothing at all like the crisp, white lines of the ship.

“I guess I could be gone for quite a while.”

“It is probable.”

“You don’t,” she says, turning to face him.  He’s close enough that she leans back against the window, her hands pressed onto the sill.  There’s nothing there to hold onto, just the plastisteel to tap her nails against, once, in the silence that follows what she said.  “Go home,” she clarifies.  “Do you.”

He doesn’t really react, only the way his eyes fall to her hands and then fix back on the planet giving her any type of a response.

“You should,” she says, whether or not he wants to hear it.  “You’ll be gone for years.”

“You as well.”

“Maybe,” she says since it’s just too hard to hope, standing there on the ship, the dark of space around them, the gleaming halls and nearly finished decks holding too much promise.  It threatens to make her ache, to make that part of her that exists in near constant hot, heady anticipation, the part that lingers underneath the exhaustion of work and classes and sleepless nights and long days, the part that she pushes down more often than not now wanting to rise up and send her thoughts tumbling down the road that the future might take, all of this here in front of her.

At her fingertips, she thinks, tapping her nails again.  Literally.

“Think about it,” she says, tugging on his sleeve.

His hand covers hers, warm and so much larger than her own, his palm pressing her fingers onto his forearm so that it’s easy enough to grip into the hard muscle there.

“Will you miss Earth,” he asks, his thumb moving over hers.  “When you graduate?”

She breathes out a soft laugh, tries to trap his thumb with her own.  “Of course.”

“Any sights you intend to visit before you depart?”

“I don’t know,” she says, circling her fingers over his sleeve.  “Did you see the Sagrada Familia?”

“I did not.”

“Are you going to?”

“Perhaps.”

“The Taj Mahal?”

“I would be amenable.”

“The Grand Canyon?” she asks and has to smile when he leans into her very slightly so that he can look down at the planet again, even though she’s pretty certain that Australia is underneath them.

“It would be convenient to the Academy,” he says, the front of his body still brushing against hers.

She picks at his sleeve, runs her thumb up his, pushing into the soft spot between his thumb and first finger, and then circling his knuckle, his eyes warm and dark and a little closer to her than he was a moment ago.

“The Galapagos?”

“I have read about the islands.”

“Iceland?” she asks as he touches under her chin.  “To see the elves?”

She bites at her lip as he stops the way he’s begun leaning down to her, one eyebrow lowering slightly.  “Elves do not exist.”

“See, we can’t know that.  Inadequate scientific research.”  His finger is still on her chin and when she smiles, his thumb comes up to touch her bottom lip.  “It’s impossible, given the size of the universe, to truly rule out any possibility.”

“There are no elves on Earth,” he amends.

“I don’t know that we can be so sure of that either,” she says as she tips her face up, pulls at his arm to move him into her.

“The evidence of such is entirely insufficient.”

“We could do a study,” she whispers, letting her lips brush against his cheek.

When he turns into her, she kisses his chin, smiling when he again tries to meet her mouth with his own.

“It is not a subject area I have previously considered,” he says, the finger on her chin moving to take her by the cheek, his palm sliding back over her ear and into her hair to hold her still.

“Our next paper?” she asks as he shifts forward, as she lets her chin tip up to meet his kiss.  He’s so careful, always, with how he touches her and this is no different, his lips catching her mouth, taking her lower lip between his, soft and light and too quick as he pulls back, leaving her pressing after him.

“Hush,” he instructs in a whisper against her mouth and kisses her again.

Her arms twine around his neck as he holds her head in his hand, meticulously kissing her over and over again.  She lets him crowd her back, lets herself grip him as his mouth on hers becomes more heated, eager, his body that was so warm near hers now a solid, hot press as he moves her against the bulkhead and window.  It’s been too long, she decides as he shifts her further backwards, his hands on her waist, gentle, and then one under her thigh much firmer as he lifts her onto the windowsill.  It’s too shallow to really sit there, so it’s his hold under her knee and her back pressed against the cool glass bracing her that keeps her in place as his hips fit between her legs.

She twists her fingers into his shirt when his mouth lifts from hers to keep him there, but he only moves far enough to kiss her chin, her cheek, and down her neck.  She thinks she feels the scrape of his teeth, which is new and interesting and makes her want to squirm, though she can’t do much more than tighten her knee into his side with how he’s holding her, no purchase to move against and her thoughts too scattered with the sucking, hot kisses he’s placing under her jaw, so she contents herself with nosing into his cheek.

She pulls back abruptly, her head bumping into the window.

“You shaved.”

She thinks he’s about to reach up and touch his own face, though he doesn’t, his movement halted as soon as it starts.

“It’s nice,” she tells him, thumbing his jaw.  It’s shaving cream, she realizes now, the scent clinging to him under the familiar notes of his soap and the smell of his skin.  She moves her thumb so that she can kiss him there, his chin too smooth for the time of night it is.  It makes her smile, makes her want to drag her lips over his cheek so she does, then whispers into his ear, “It’s really nice.”

She kisses him again before he can tell her it was logical or rational or sensible, enjoying the lack of pricking stubble against her lips, holding him there with her fingers pressed lightly to his jaw, whatever words it was that she swallowed up becoming a long exhale against her cheek.

A little gasp escapes her when he lifts her from the window sill, his hands spread hot under her thighs, a gasp that turns into a breathy laugh as he sits on the edge of his bed and pulls her down into his lap.  Her uniform rides up high, his fingers quickly edging it up further and then drawing down the top of her thighs to her knees to the edge of her boots and back up again.

“Is this-“ he begins and she just nods, already too breathless against his mouth.

“Of course it’s ok,” she says.  He fumbles at the wrong shoulder for the zipper of her dress and she has to let go of him to reach back and pull it down, his fingers coming to cover hers and then help her tug it off, her undershirt going with it.

She rises out of his lap enough to twist and reach for her boots, kicking one off but stopping as she tugs at the second one, aware that he’s gone still under her, his hands unmoving where they’ve curled over her thighs again.

Her boot falls to the floor with an overly loud thud, leaving her hands feeling useless, one fluttering over her bare stomach before she plucks at his shirt.  

“Take this off,” she instructs.

Instead, his hands rise to her breasts, the breath she lets out when his thumbs find her nipples through her bra threatening more towards a noise than a hard exhale.  She grabs at his shoulders when his mouth falls to her neck again, his uniform against her bare stomach and arms making her want his skin instead.  She works his shirt up as far as she can, gripping at his sides, palming over the dip of his spine and pushing her fingers into the waistband of his pants and his thumbs circle over her and he nips at her collarbone.

When she grabs his chin and brings his face up, he’s dark-eyed and open mouthed and she kisses him, holding him still as she licks into his mouth, bites at his bottom lip and lets the arm he slings around her hips rub her down onto him.

She thinks she always forgets how much strength there is to him, how his body is solid and hard, corded strength under her hands wherever she touches, unyielding muscle and firmer bone.  When she pulls at his shirt again, this time he lets her strip it off of him, bunch it up and throw it somewhere beside the bed, uncovering the expanse of his skin, pale and soft and smooth and always so hot.  He lets her unfasten his pants, too, and when she tries to work them off no matter that how he’s sitting and her own weight on them prevents them from budging, he turns them over, laying her out over his bed and shucking his pants and boxers off onto the floor with the accompanying thumps of his boots.

She slings her panties after them, though when she reaches under herself for the clasp of her bra, his hand on her breastbone stops her.

His attention on her, dark and focused with his brows slightly tightened and his mouth slightly swollen and parted makes her want to smile, or maybe makes her want to flush, or maybe makes her want to reach up and drag him down to her, and would make her want to say something except that his other hand is trailing up her thigh and then over her stomach and then lower, so that all she gets out is a cut off gasp as his fingers find her.

The breath he lets out is much longer, a drawn out exhale that borders on something much like a sigh, his shoulders falling slightly and his throat working as he swallows.  He drags a finger over the curve of her breast, reaches behind her to unclasp her bra and toss it aside, and then is laying down on his stomach and pushing her thighs apart with his palms before she can ready herself for the hot press of his mouth on her.

It’s not slow like it was last time.  His shoulders bump into the backs of her thighs, pressing them further apart, his thumbs spreading her and his tongue so insistent her hands fly to her face, fingertips digging into her forehead and a needy whimper escaping into her wrists.  Still, it feels like it takes ages, a slow steady build of shivering, watery pleasure, giving her time to focus on the spread of his hands over her thighs, one edging up to rest on her stomach, and on the wet sounds his mouth makes, how his head moves, his hair tickling at her skin.

She wants it to last even longer, to study him, to burn into her the way his thumb rubs at her inner thigh, how he pulls back for a moment to take a breath, his eyes flicking up to hers, and how his back feels under her heel, but she already feels like a mess of heat and shivering skin, a hot prickle the length of her body.  Every rub of his tongue against her feels like he’s drawing her closer to a precipice, urging her further and further over the edge  and when she comes it’s like stepping off of a sheer drop, finding a long tumble beneath her, his hands anchoring her, hot where they touch as a whine, one that is too desperately loud, is pulled from her.

The ceiling comes into focus, then the circling of his fingertips just below her navel, then the weight of his cheek on her thigh when he rests his head there.

He doesn’t move except to push a finger into her, and then two, and then to press in a way that makes her hand fly to her forehead, makes a broken pant of air push out of her, makes her think that this might become embarrassing if he keeps going like that, so sweaty and messy when what she’s sure is only a moment ago they were talking and now her mouth is dry and she’s shifting and fidgeting on his bed as she nearly tells him to stop except that she wants nothing more than for him to continue.

Her hand heavily pats at him, finding strands of hair to push off his forehead.  His eyes are bright and his mouth is wet and she can’t look at him and can’t possibly look anywhere else.

“What?” she asks as he continues to stare at her.

“I did not say anything.”  He noses into the crease of her thigh, his breath hot and his fingers still a firm pressure inside of her.  When the press of them makes her shift she feels how the fabric beneath her has grown damp under her shoulders, the tacky, sticky sweat that sprung up across her skin leaving beads of moisture between her back and his bedspread.  It’s not going to stop with him still touching her like that, with his eyes dark on hers, with how his tongue darts across his lower lip and then he shifts enough to press his mouth to her again.

It pulls a hiss out of her and he starts to draw back, only stopping when she grabs at the back of his head.

“Good,” she gets out, her other hand joining in twining through his hair in a way that hopefully doesn’t hurt, though he seems to not care anchored there against her.  She feels her back starting to lift off the bed and his fingers press again and then she’s lost to it with a loud groan, her eyes squeezed shut and her thighs threatening to shake as heat begins to throb through her once again.

“Don’t stop,” she instructs, only to have him lift his mouth away.

“I was not intending to.”

“Fu-Funny,” she says, her breath broken and too short.  “That’s funny, Spock.”

“I am glad you are sufficiently amused,” he says and squeezes at her thigh with his other hand, the one that’s not twisting inside of her.  When he splays his fingers over her stomach, his head dipping down again, she takes his hand and holds it, his fingers a tight, sure grip around hers.

“More?” he asks when another orgasm has welled up in her, leaving her boneless and open mouthed in its wake as he moves up her body, his voice a deep rumble against her stomach, her breastbone, her neck as his lips play over it, up and then back down again.  She lets the pressure of his kisses there tip her head to the side since she certainly can’t stop it.

“No,” she says except that her stomach swoops at the thought, so she amends, “Not right now.”

“Understood,” he says as he lays over her, his body a long, hot arc of skin.  She thinks she would touch him if she weren’t so thick and weighted down, might like to feel the play of muscles in his back as he starts to kiss over her shoulder, or his hard thighs as he traps her leg between his.

She follows him, sluggish and slow when he rolls onto his side.  Hooking her leg over his hip and scooting closer to him, she decides that she could spend a lot more time like this than she currently does, touching the soft skin at the top of his thigh, finding the tendon that runs between his neck and shoulder with her mouth, pushing her tongue into the dip of his collarbone and wrapping her hand around his length so that he exhales against her cheek, a rush of hot air that makes her shift so that she can kiss him again.

When she pulls away, she slides her other arm under the pillow his head is resting on, watching as his chin dips towards his chest so that he can watch, his attention trained on her hand and his lips parted.

“You like this,” she states, his stomach rising and falling fast and quick.

“In my culture-“ he starts, swallows, and then doesn’t continue.

She leans in to smile against his mouth, presses a soft kiss there.  “No sociology lesson tonight?”

That crease between his brows forms, the expression so different with his wide, dark eyes and how his mouth works over words that don’t come.

She lets her foot stroke over his calf and shifts closer to him, her hand bumping into her stomach on each stroke.  The way he’s still looking down between their bodies makes her only want more of him, so she gives him a squeeze, one that makes him inhale sharply, before letting go and turning back over her shoulder.

To find, of course, no nightstand there.  And not one beyond him, either, his quarters as bare of extra furniture as they have been all night.

His throat works as he swallows.  She pulls her arm from underneath his pillow so that she can prop herself up on her elbow, searching for a replicator he doesn’t have and then briefly closing her eyes when she remembers that they’re not working tonight anyway.

He’s still laying there on his side, his cheeks beginning to show a green flush and his hand reaching for hers.

“Nyota,” he says, though his eyes don’t meet hers.

She straddles him, pressing his hand down into the pillow beside his head, making him shift onto his back, his eyes flicking rapid over her face.

“What do you want?” she asks, only to have him shake his head.

He still doesn’t answer when she sits back onto his thighs, pulling their twined fingers to rest next to his hip and her other hand curling around him again.  He’s gorgeous, laid out like that before her, his stomach tightened and his thighs tensing, once, beneath her.

“Like that?” she asks, though he remains silent, his tongue darting out to lick at his lips.  She tugs at his hand.  “Sufficient?  Adequate?  Acceptable?  Spock?”

He nods, his head dragging against the pillow.

“More?” she asks and his eyes fall from her own to her lips.  She leans down, mouths at his breastbone, smiles against his skin.

He pulls her up to kiss with a hand around the back of her head and pressed against him like that, she lingers in the feeling of how his kiss slips into being nearly messy, feeling the way his body is strung tense underneath her own and only grows more rigid with each stroke of her hand.

It’s even better when she breaks their kiss, slips out of his grip on her so that his hand falls from her hair back to the bed, and drags her mouth down his neck, down that flushed, hot skin to where his stomach is heaving, and further.

“Nyota,” he says yet again, this time in a tone that stops her.  He doesn’t get anything else out, staring down the length of his body at her, his mouth parted but silent.

She strokes over his stomach, the muscles there twitching under her fingers as she rubs circles on his skin.  It takes her a moment before she closes her eyes in understanding, realizing what that look in his eyes means and why he’s staring at her like that before she kisses the hard jut of his hipbone, her hand finding and squeezing his waist.

“You haven’t done this before?” she asks, less of a question than it could be.  She wonders if it should surprise her.  It doesn’t, not really, not the fact of it - maybe that he told her at all, so much of his life sequestered away behind what he doesn’t say that this may well have been another part of that.

She hears his head shake and feels the too light touch of his fingers on her shoulder.

“Ok,” she says simply.  “Do you want me to stop?”

“No.”

She pets at his stomach, willing him to relax and trying not to smile at how quickly his answer comes.  She thinks about telling him he’s nearly shaking with how tight he’s wound, corded, hard muscle under her hands wherever she touches, though surely he knows that, one hand fisted in the sheets and the other falling useless and empty onto the bed beside her as she moves downward.

She can feel how he props himself up on his elbows to watch her as she takes him in her mouth and also feels the moment he lays back, something less than a slump though the way his fingers skitter across her shoulder is telling enough.  His stomach, the muscles of his hips and thighs are still bunched tight under her hands and she digs her thumbs into his inner thighs, wraps her fingers around him and pushes down with the flat of her hand when his hips threaten to rise.

“Don’t,” she instructs, takes her mouth off of him long enough to say it before licking a long stripe up him, hearing the way his breath catches and feeling how his body shifts against the bed.

Once, she looks up.  His head is thrown back, his mouth open and that crease between his brows is a deep furrow, his breath coming hard and fast enough that it’s making his chest and stomach rise, a green flush spread over his skin down to his chest, splotchy and patchy.  His heel drags against the bed and she strokes over his knee, his hand falling to find her own.

Afterwards, she presses a kiss to his stomach.  She smiles at him, propping her chin on his hipbone and smoothing her hand along his side over and over.

“What do you think?” she asks as she lets her fingers skate over to tease light around his bellybutton.

“A single data point is insufficient evidence.”  His voice is rough and soft and she huffs out a quiet laugh, poking at his stomach.  He grabs at her hand to stop her from doing it a second time and holds it in his, his eyes still closed as his fingers squeeze hers.

She lays there just taking him in before his eyes finally blink open and he pulls her up, gathering her to him.  His palms pass up and then back down her back before he folds his arms around her, solid and tight across her back.  She kicks at the blankets until she can pull the sheet over them, tugging it up to their shoulders and snuggling down into the warmth of his body beneath her.  It’s too warm and she still feels too messy and far too hot, her skin flush with the push of her blood through her, but she lets herself relax into it rather than adjusting the sheet again or how closely she’s pressed to him, his fingers tracing through damp beads of sweat on her lower back.  His movements are too languid for him to be normal, too slow and nearly clumsy and she nestles closer, giving into the urge to let her eyes shut.

It’s so quiet, the only sounds in the room their breathing, and then the rustle of fabric as he smooths the sheet back to run his hand over her hair.  He keeps doing it as her heart slows and her breathing evens out, as her limbs grow too heavy to move.  She doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t either, his breath a quiet whisper against her forehead and the length of their bodies touching, his fingers gentle as they play through her hair, leaving her half asleep and entirely relaxed in the cradle of his arms.

She jumps when the computer whistles and is nearly sure that he does the same, her hand flying to her chest and a smile creeping across her face at the suddenness of her own reaction.

“Secondary photonic inducer in need of calibration,” the computer announces.  “Thirty minute warning.”

“That’s you?” she asks, covering her yawn as she shifts off of him, though she’s sure that there’s no one else on board to handle it, the silence too complete for anyone else to be near them.

He folds the blankets back to his waist, pushing himself up to sitting as he nods.  She’s cold without him there despite the heat of his quarters, and tugging the blankets back up is not a good enough substitute for his skin pressed to hers.  Still, she curls into the sheet, watching as he picks his clothes off the floor, his movements still lacking that grace he normally has when he moves.  Instead, he’s slightly too slow as he drapes his shirt over the foot of the bed and bends down to pull his boxers from their tangle in his pants.

“Can I come?” she asks before she’s entirely thought the question through, only sure that his quarters will be too quiet with him gone and that there will be nothing for her to do but to wait for him and listen to the silence of the empty room.

“You are not tired?”

“No,” she says, not wanting to think about how his quarters will be punctured with the light from the corridor and the hiss of the door when he leaves, not when his hand could still be moving over her hair, so slow and gentle, instead of shaking his pants out.  She watches as he pulls them on and fastens them over his flat stomach, working the edge of the sheet between her fingers.  “If it’s ok.”

“I would be amenable,” he says, turning his black undershirt right side out, looking hardly more alert than she feels.

She’s still combing her fingers through her hair and blinking against how bright the hallway is as the turbo lift doors open and she follows him in, trying to work out the disarray of her ponytail that his hands left, sure that she never intended to be walking through the halls of the flagship with her skin still flushed and the need to run her knuckle under her eyes to neaten her makeup, but she is.  His shirt is rumpled across his shoulders, the jersey pulled on too quickly and catching in tiny folds against his undershirt at the base of his neck.  When she smooths it out, it makes him turn to her and she starts to pull her hands back, and then stops herself, more carefully adjusting how the cloth lays.  There’s nobody there to see them, no reason to not flatten the fabric of his shirt and enjoy the firm play of muscles in his back.

Her hands are still on him when the turbo lift doors part and she lets them fall as he walks ahead of her, sure that her mouth is open and that she should be moving her feet, though remedying either of those things seems suddenly so much less important than just staring.

“Nyota?” he asks, half turning back to her and she shakes her head since she never thought to picture where they were going, sure it would be Engineering or maybe a lab somewhere, even one of the computer terminals set into the walls of the ship, some corner of some white corridor.

She was also certain, or had been, once, back before she was ever going to go into Spock’s office at Gaila’s urging, ever going to spend a summer with him and have that raised eyebrow of his as he waits for her to move be as familiar to her as it is, that her first time on a bridge of a ship wouldn’t be heralded by someone saying her first name, on a Saturday evening when she should have been playing cards with her friends, in her dorm, a world away from where she is now.

“This…” she says as she feels herself cross to him, then run out of words to finish that sentence or maybe she never had them in the first place, no part of her that can actually put language to the sight of gleaming displays, the view screen with Spacedock lit up in front of the ship, and the way Spock’s hand falls to her shoulder to urge her with him.

The bridge is just as bright as the rest of the ship and maybe even more so, the floor nearly glowing in a high polish and the shine of lights winking off of screens, warring with the backlit blue and red readouts.  The tap of their boots on the floor seems to echo, the space just as empty as everywhere else on the ship, despite the chairs waiting at each terminal, Pike’s turned slightly to the side like he just rose from it.  

It makes her want to touch everything, to straighten the chair, to drag her fingers over the edge of each console, to run her nails along the bannister that curves beside her as she follows Spock.  The idea that her touch would smudge something, would mar the pristine shine keeps her hands next to her.

It gets harder to keep them there as Spock leads her to his station, since he has no hesitation in tapping in a series of commands so that her fingers nearly itch to feel how the console would respond if she did the same.

She stares around herself as he works, his eyes tracing over various readouts before he taps something into a padd that he picks up from next to him and then reads a graph the computer produces, one that she can’t make much sense of.  Really, she can only name a handful of pieces of equipment around them, all of it so much more advanced than the training equipment she’s ever used.  It’s all almost overwhelming, the amount of equipment around them that she barely has an idea of as to how it functions, and how quickly Spock types and how once he reaches over to spin a knob twice to the right and then back half a turn without needing to look at it to do so.  

“Sit,” he offers and she does so quickly in the nearest chair, before staring at the console in front of her and then with a jolt that might have come quicker if there weren’t a part of her that is still too relaxed, she realizes that she recognizes the input screen.

“Oh,” she says and touches her fingers to it before pulling her hand back to her lap.

“Hawkins is designing a simulator,” Spock says as he keeps spinning the knob around, his eyes never leaving his display.  “It is to be installed at HQ, though cadets will be welcome to train on it.”

“No,” she says.

His mouth twitches slightly.  “Yes.”

“Really?”

“Shall I inform him of the need to construct a second one?  Since you will be occupying the first, likely without taking the time to sleep or eat?”

“Yes,” she says and then sits there staring at the console in front of her until Spock has to touch her on the shoulder to get her attention now that he’s finished.

“When will it be done?” she asks as they walk back to his quarters.  “And what will the programming be like?  Are you doing it?  Will it have built in scenarios like the piloting sims?  How many?”

“In the spring, complex, I am assisting as needed, yes, and I would say more than you can likely complete, but I have learned to not underestimate your tenacity.”

“I think I’m glad I didn’t know,” she says as the doors to his quarters close behind them.  “I don’t think I would have left Hawkins alone.”

“Or at least forgone the option to play Scrabble in favor of staging an inquisition.”

“I’m putting that on my resume, you know,” she says as she toes off her boots.  “It’s not every day I beat a senior officer at Scrabble.”

“I am pleased to know that your resume is far more well rounded than it was.”

“Well,” she says, thinking suddenly of that other weekend she spent with him, an interminably long car ride.  “Thanks.”

It comes out far more serious than she intended and instead of saying anything back, he just nods, leaving the room quiet around them and her all too aware of the silence of the ship, alternatively comforting in its peace and too close with the sheer solitude.  

Now, it only serves to remind her of the unchartered territory between them, what’s left that they’re still not familiar with, the fumble of toothbrushes and night clothes foreign even after all this time.  Not entirely new but new enough, she thinks, as she unzips her dress with none of the feverishness of earlier, this time folding it and putting it in her bag and dropping her bra on top of it, sure that she can feel his eyes on her as she pulls on the shorts and tank top she always sleeps in.  New but not uncomfortable, none of that unease that pricked at her the last time she wore this same shirt in front of him, in a different room with a different bed, in the middle of the desert on the planet still spinning below them.  That bed was neatly made before they slipped into it, not the mess of the sheets that they left, a rumpled pile of fabric twisted in the center of the mattress, tossed back and tangled.

She wonders if he’s thinking of the same weekend, if folding back the blankets together and slipping between them brings back any of those memories for him.  Maybe, she can’t help but think as they lay on their sides facing each other, the room dim around them.  She reaches out and touches his cheek, presses her thumbs to his lips before leaning over and kissing him once, softly, lingering just long enough to let her eyes fall closed.

“This has been wonderful,” she tells him, shifting slightly closer, pulling the sheets up to her chin and burrowing down into the pillow.  He’s close enough that she can run her toes down his shin, so she does, watching how his eyes blink at the touch.

“You are happy?”

She nudges the top of his foot.  “Very much so.”

“Excellent.”

She lets go of the sheet to pluck at his sleeve of his t-shirt and then pushes it up his arm, her fingers scratching gently over the skin she finds before easing into more of a gentle rubbing, tiny circles that she traces back and forth again.

He moves to free his other arm so that his hand can find hers, her palm just above his elbow, his own palm pressing her hand into him.  

“Are you tired?” she whispers only to have him shake his head.

“Yourself?”

“No.”  She shifts even closer to him, down deeper into the bed so that she’s more comfortable.  “How do you think the game went?”

“I believe we will be able to ascertain the answer by Commander Ho’s behavior on Monday morning.”

Nyota wrinkles her nose at the thought of work and school and the Academy, shaking her head into the pillow.

“I can’t believe I have two years left.”

“A year and a half,” he corrects.  “Very nearly.”

The thought still makes her sigh, her eyes closing at the idea of three and a half more semesters, finals waiting for her at the end of all of them, and what will likely be increasingly hard courses, the demands of practical trainings so much more rigorous than just coursework, no matter how much she wants to get her hands on that sim.  She will, she knows, and will probably be able to get Spock to come with her the first time she goes and show it to her, talk him into sitting with her.  He’d do it, likely without question, answering anything she wants to know and telling her all that he’s gleaned from sitting next to Hawkins every shift.  Still.  It’s not the same as being up here.

“Can we just fast forward to graduation?” she asks, her eyes still squeezed shut.

“It is a long and tedious ceremony,” he says as his fingers shift against hers.  “If you are going to go to the trouble of bending the space time continuum, I would recommend doing so in a way that you reach the celebrations cadets enjoy afterwards.”

She opens her eyes to smile at him.  “Did you and Puri get smashed?”

“Doctor Puri got married.”

“You know that I notice when you don’t answer questions, right?”

“I do not know to what you are referring.”

She prods at his arm.  “What did you do after graduation?”

“Packed.”

She’s still smiling.  “After that.”

“Cleaned my side of our dorm room.”

“And after that?”

“Cleaned Puri’s side of our room.  His parents were meeting Arlene’s for the first time.  I believe a certain amount of distraction was inevitable.”  

“That’s going to be me,” she sighs.  “Isn’t it.  Gaila’s going to be off finding one last hurrah on Earth, probably with that guy with all the tentacles, and I’m going to be left organizing her…”

“Her what?” Spock prompts.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me how bad your hangover was.”

“Drinking to excess is illogical.”

“Is it now.”  He’s quiet again, his finger circling over one of her knuckles, slow and rhythmic so that it makes her wonder if he knows he’s doing it.

“You and your classmates will enjoy the celebrations, I am certain,” he says while she tries to decide whether to press him on the topic, or if it’s more fun to just lay there with his finger tracing her hand, imagining all the things he and Puri might have gotten up to.

“Sounds formidable.”

“It was.”

“And terrible, probably.  I bet Kirk manages to win all the awards there are to win.  He would, too, I can just see it now.”

“I would disagree, but I believe you are correct.”

“I know, and I hate that,” she says, blowing out a hard sigh and shaking her head so that her hair whispers over the pillowcase, harder than she probably needs to but Kirk has always driven her a bit nuts, gotten under her skin like few others ever have.  Spock did, once.  It was different, though, ground at her and irritated her in an entirely other way, one that threatens to put that smile back on her face again.  “He told me the other week that he’s going to take that test again.”

“I do not find that surprising.”

“It’s not,” she sighs, again, unsure as ever how Kirk always pulls that harsh rush of air out of her.  “He kept asking me to do it again, kept me up all night with it and - no-“ She cuts herself off before she can get any further, suddenly sure as to how he must have heard that, so different than how it really was.  “Sorry, no.  Kirk- Gaila was out the other night with this guy and Kirk couldn’t get into his room and I let him sleep in Gaila’s bed.  He was in the hall and I-“  She’s sure he’s going to pull his hand back so she beats him to it, tugging her hand from under his to grab at his.  “It didn’t seem fair to make him sleep out there.”

His eyes are on hers, dark and too focused, nearly, something in them that doesn’t soften until he blinks.

“Logical,” Spock finally says and she nearly wants to smile at how annoyed he sounds by it.

“It was horrible,” she says firmly even though he’s still looking at her slightly too intently.

“Was it?”

“No, but I don’t think you like him much.”

“I have no opinion.”

“Sure,” she says.  He does, she knows, no matter whether or not he wants to give voice to it and how smooth his expression is.  That alone is telling enough and she purses her lips as she studies him before feeling her forehead crease and her eyes narrow, that tightness at the corner of his mouth not completely gone and something about how he’s watching her still too attentive.  “You don’t think…”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”  He doesn’t have an answer to that and his expression is suddenly too blank, to entirely free and clear of any hint of what he’s thinking, enough so that she tightens her hold on his fingers.  “It wasn’t anything.  At all.  Ever.”

“I understand.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes.”

“You sound really convincing.”

“Interpreting tonal modulation is a societal construct used in Terran culture to decipher meaning other than that which is conveyed by-“

She licks at her lips, still half squinting at him and then pulling her hand from his to smooth out that furrow that has appeared between his brows before he can continue to ramp up with whatever he was going to say, some long, overly complex speech about how little he cares.  She kisses him before he can get another word in and he immediately returns it, faster and firmer than she thought he might.  “Say tonal modulation again.”

“Why?”

“Say societal construct,” she whispers, pushing her fingers back into his hair and sliding closer to him.

“You are entirely illogical.”

“Sure am.”  She noses into his cheek and squeezes the back of his head.  “Spock.”

“Yes?”

“I’m not going to date Jim Kirk.”

“I did not think you were.”

“Ok,” she says.  She lays her leg over his, all too aware of how close she’s moved to him, how thin their clothes are and how when she kisses him again, his leg moves against hers, shifting even closer.  “And Spock?”

“Yes?”

She knows his answer before she even says it, maybe before the question is half formed, maybe before she even knew to ask it, a certainty that she hears in her voice that she never knew she felt until it’s right there in front of her, voiced in the words she speaks between them.  “You’re not seeing anyone else.”

His hand twitches, slightly, a tiny, nearly unnoticeable motion against her skin where his hand has fallen to her waist.  “Else?”  He blinks, twice, his eyes locked on hers.  “No.”

His words are disjointed and choppy, unusual for how he normally speaks and she can feel him swallow.  She runs her fingers through his hair along the back of his head, over and over again.

“Good.  I didn’t think so.”  She didn’t, ever, or maybe once, way back at the beginning of all of this, so many aspects about his life left unanswered.  Now, she can fill in the gaps, the edges of him colored in and clear, spread before her in how his eyes bore into hers and then cut away, quick and too restless.

“You are not either, I presume,” he says except that for as even as his voice is, as it ever is, as hard as he seems to always try to keep any infection from it, it comes out as a question.

“No.”  She props herself up enough to kiss him once again and then lays her head back down on the pillow next to his, close enough that it’s hard to focus on him.  She hikes her leg further up his so it’s more wrapped over him, her heel at the back of his knee.  “So therefore, logically, that would mean that-“

“I believe the reconfiguration process may be complete by now,” he says before she can finish her sentence.

“Don’t interrupt me,” she says, unable to keep the smile off her face or from her voice.  “And ok, pertinent and relevant information so eagerly delivered aside, we don’t, then, really need a condom, do we?”

“Is it not Terran norm?”

“Sometimes,” she says.  “Yes.  It can be.  For some people.”  She draws back slightly further, studying him, trying to unwind what it is that he’s saying.  “What did you think?”

“What I said.”

“It’s not that normal.”

“I see.”

“It should be.”  

“I agree.”

“Ok.”  She purses her lips, trying to parse what’s in his expression, sure that she can pull her leg off of his, can pull her hands back to herself and get herself to forget about how much closer she wants him.  “But if you want to wait until-“

“That is not what I intended to imply,” he says too quickly.

“Good,” she says through her smile.

“Indeed.”

She clears her throat and nearly wants to laugh just to have something slice through the silence that falls, everything too still after he nods, once, and they just lay there for a moment studying each other, none of the ease of eager hands and hot mouths to pave the way, just his eyes, soft and brown, on hers and how his chest rises on his breath, clothes and space between their bodies that she wants gone.  “Now, then?”

“Yes,” he says, just as fast.

“Ok,” she says again and it’s crazy to feel any amount of awkwardness, but she can’t help it as she shoves the sheets back further and crawls over him, kissing his jaw so that she doesn’t have to look at him.  Utterly and completely crazy, which maybe he feels too with how his hands settle on her waist, his fingers barely edging under her shirt no matter how he tugged at her clothes earlier.

She sits back on his thighs and grabs the hem to peel it off, tossing it beside the bed and then when his hands don’t move from where they’ve spread on her thighs, she works his shirt up and off too, making him sit up enough that she can tug it over his shoulders and arms and drop it off the edge of the bed after hers.

It’s better when she leans down to kiss him, his palms a warm press of heat to her bare back.  This is familiar, something she’s entirely acquainted with, how his lips part for hers and the tickle of his breath against her cheek when he exhales.  His hands move slowly up to her shoulders and then back down again, one pressed over her lower back and the other sliding down to her thigh and she thinks that she’s no stranger to the rest of it, either, how his fingers trace the edge of her panties, leaving her with goosebumps and the wish that he’d slide a finger under the edge of the fabric instead of just teasing at it.  She finally hooks her thumbs into his boxers and pushes them down his hips and has to squirm out of her own shorts and panties, his hand on her shoulder to brace her before she can kneel over him again, her pulse already starting to pick up with that heady rush she always feels when he touches her like this.

She's struck by how pale he is under her, somehow more apparent in the dimness of the room, his slim sides and those narrow hips of his between her knees and how when she skates her fingers down over the tightness of his stomach it twitches under her touch. He looks vulnerable, nearly, pliant under her hands.  She feels a weight in the air as she lays her forearms next to his head and shifts closer, an edge of anticipation that seems heavier now, in how slow their movements are and the way his thumb smooths over her hip again and again, where his hand is pressed against her thigh.  

The air grows dense and heated between them and she thinks only of the way he exhales as she lowers herself onto him, her forehead finding his shoulder and his hand palming over her back. It makes her feel shaky, with want and need and the firm hard press of him in her but more so the silence of the moment, how his lips press once to her cheek.

“Ok?” she whispers as she starts to move, his answer a nod where he’s pressed his face into her hair.  She’s sure that it’s never been like this before, not so soft and quiet between them, not so slow and achingly drawn out, when he pulls back to look at her his eyes wide open, trained on hers so she can't look away, the softness in his expression for her alone and she drinks it in, better even than his hands falling to her hips, the way he guides her against him.

"Good?" she asks, her breath held and caught and released again, her chest too full to keep it there.

“Yes.”

It is good, heated and drawn out, the pleasure nearly secondary to how he looks under her so that when her skin starts to shiver she almost doesn’t notice it until it feels like every inch of her is hypersensitive.

“Nyota?” he starts to ask, his words cut off in her mouth in a sharp gasp.  His mouth is hanging open again like it was earlier and she bends to kiss it and he never finishes the sentence.  Her only answer is to squeeze her eyes shut and bury her face against his as her orgasm wells up in her, hard and sudden and leaving her limp afterwards.  She’s still trying to catch her breath when his arm comes around her to hold her close and he mutters something in Vulcan that she doesn’t catch, his face pressed into her neck, his entire body tightening under hers.

She doesn’t want to move away from him and there’s no reason to, not when he tucks her beside him, his hands still moving over her, sweeping down her back to her hips and then up again, over and over.

“Spock,” she whispers into his skin.  She thinks his hands might be shaking or maybe that’s her, her entire body still trembling.  She pushes even closer to him, their skin tacky where it touches.

“Yes?”

She draws her toes over the top of his foot and then pulls back enough to kiss him.  She kisses him again, too, after that, just because she can, because he’s lying there with his eyes blinking slowly and his hands haven’t stopped outlining her back, her sides, coming up over her shoulders before moving down again, her skin traced over with the heat left in the wake of everywhere he touches.  “Can we do that again?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Now?”

“In a minute?” she amends.  She hooks her leg over his and leans in to kiss him again.  She doesn’t want to stop and doesn’t have to, no reason to not card her fingers through his hair and let him pull her flush against him, kissing over his cheek and chin and back to his mouth, even though it’s hard to do so with how wide she’s smiling.  She’s supposed to be tired, she’s pretty sure, a long day of homework and a night full of buzzing excitement but mostly she can’t imagine wanting to sleep, not when he’s right next to her, his lips right there to kiss again, and then again, sure that she doesn’t want to stop any time soon, not when the option is there to keep going.  It’s like something out of a half remembered dream, or maybe a hope she didn’t even know she had, what she never knew she wanted but now that it’s there she can’t help but take, closing his hands in hers and trying to feel all at once everywhere their skin touches, from his nose against her cheek to where their wrists brush together to his knee bumping against hers.  She can’t, no matter how she tries, hold it all in her mind at once, not when heat skates through her fingers and she’s smiling like she has been all night, giddy with a rushing, hot happiness that only seems to grow the longer she stays pressed up against him like that, leaving her unsure how she ever thought to manage without this, and only knowing that she could chase this feeling down for hours until sleep takes her, and it still won’t be enough.  “We have all night.”


	38. Chapter 38

He’s sleeping on his side again, his chest rising and falling slowly, rhythmically.  She watches it as she blinks in the darkness, trying to make sense of what time it might be without sunrise or the sounds of the city coming through the window, the blackness of space and shine of the stars all she can see.

His hair is soft under her fingers when she brushes it back from his forehead.  The touch doesn’t stir him, so she nestles closer, pushes into him until she is tucked under the same part of the sheet, their knees brushing together and his breath tickling across her skin.

She wakes again to the whistle of the computer, his arm a heavy weight across her waist and the length of his body pressed to her back.  

“Secondary photonic inducer in need of calibration,” the computer says too loudly.  “Thirty minute warning.”

“Understood,” he says, his voice a rough rumble.

“What time is it?” she asks into the pillow, unwilling to open her eyes.

“Early.”

She smiles into the pillow.  “That’s not an answer.”

“It is.”

“That’s not a specific answer.”

“My apologies.”

His arm is tucked around her ribs, tickling the bottom of her breasts.  He tightens it slightly, pulling her back into him and she feels his nose against the back of her neck, pushing aside her hair and then his breath on her skin.

“Morning,” she murmurs, taking his hand in hers and pulling it up under her chin.  She brings the blankets up too, no matter that it’s too warm in his quarters and with his body pressed against hers, sure that she’s sweating or maybe she’s just still sticky and damp from the night before, the intervening hours not enough to dry the tackiness of her skin.  He adjusts himself behind her, pressing his face more firmly into her hair, his knees coming up behind hers and she feels his body tighten in what might be a yawn.

It must of been, since his breath is a warm wash over her shoulder as he exhales.  It’s nice like this.  Warm and snug and when he reaches for the sheet to edge it back down again, his body beginning to pull away from hers, she tightens her hold on his hand and shakes her head into the pillow.

“Don’t.”

“The inducer,” he says, scratchy and low and without much conviction, his body relaxing into hers again.  She doesn’t open her eyes, not willing to admit to the fact that it’s morning.  It’s easy enough to pretend with no sunlight streaming in the room, no sounds of the city waking up around them.  Instead, it’s just the hum of the ship and the whirr of the environmental controls and the soft sound his mouth makes as he presses a kiss to the back of her neck.  The day is out there, somewhere beyond the confines of his bed and his quarters and the quiet corner of the ship that they’re on, officers likely already bustling around Spacedock and the Academy likely slowly coming alive below them, no matter what the hour is, cadets on their way to the library or the gym.

“In a minute,” she says, but she lets him tug his hand from her grip, his palm pressing against her breastbone and then to her stomach, warm and big, his fingers tracing light circles on her skin.

“Go back to sleep,” he tells her, though his hand doesn’t still and he doesn’t start to get up again.  Instead, when she shifts slightly, his hand slips further down her body, making her smile into the pillow under her cheek.  He’s going to stop any second, she’s sure, going to get up and get dressed, but for now his fingers are tracking back and forth right beneath her bellybutton, and then down her thigh and back up, light over her hip in a way that threatens to make her shift against the bed again.  She tightens her hold on the sheet, feeling the give in it as she hikes it further up under her chin.  They must have kicked it loose last night because it feel like it’s untucked from the mattress, threatening to expose her toes to the relatively cooler air of the room.  She tucks them against his ankle, trapping it between her feet as his fingers circle low on her stomach again.

It’s too much to have him teasing her like that and it’s definitely too much to think about the moment when he’ll stop and rise and dress, so she takes his hand in hers, pushes it down and breathes a long sigh into the pillow as his fingers find her.

“You have to go,” she whispers no matter how much she wants him to keep going, her voice catching on a sharp inhale even as she hooks her leg back over his.

His only answer is another kiss pressed to her shoulder and then a trail of them up to her neck.  She drags her hair to the side for him so that he can mouth up under her ear, her hand falling to his arm where it’s draped over and around her, his fingers still busy and working.  It makes her shaky and too hot, her pulse picking up when it feels like it only just settled from last night, her skin starting to prick and shiver and her nails digging into his arm as her eyes squeeze shut.

“You should get up,” she tries again, wanting to sound more convincing this time around, like she actually cares about anything beyond the way his fingers are stroking and that no matter if the inducer implodes, that he doesn’t stop.  She starts to try a third time, but the breath she takes so that she can get words out gets stuck and stutters and she ends up ineffectually patting at his arm, like that will communicate everything about how their duty to Starfleet means she shouldn’t be keeping him here.  Instead, it makes his arm tighten and she can’t help but push back into him and wonder if she can worm her hand between the press of their bodies to grip him where he’s hard, pressed up against her.

She can’t, but she can grab at his hip as heat starts to skate through her stomach and the sounds she makes into her pillow grow increasingly fraught, torn hard from her throat and too loud for the silence of the room.

“Secondary photonic inducer in need of calibration,” the computer says again.  

He raises his head from where he’s been breathing against the back of her neck, his fingers never faltering.

“Understood,” he says again.

“Spock,” she says, trying to insert an edge of importance into her tone, though it mostly comes out weak and slightly too breathy.  Hearing the lack of conviction in her own voice doesn’t make her want to roll away from him and it certainly doesn’t make him stop, his mouth eager along her shoulder and when she tightens her leg over his, as awkward as the angle is, he presses lightly into her once, and then again firmer.  She tries to make room for him, peeling her skin from his enough to wiggle and shift enough that instead of prodding at her back he’s nudging against her, but she can’t do much more than squirm against him, his breath picking up with every movement.

“You have-” she starts to say again, only to have him crawl over her, shifting her onto her back.

“I do,” he agrees.

“Is the ship going to fall apart?” she asks as she makes room for him to kneel between her legs.

“Unlikely.”

“You’re sure?” she asks, smiling up at him as his hands fall to her shins.  She pulls at him with her heel pressed to the back of his thigh, letting her tongue play over her bottom lip as he eases into her.  He falls onto his hands next to her shoulders, his hips already picking up a steady, slow rhythm, one that’s easy and unhurried and makes her relax into the mattress and pillows and the mess of the sheets, that heat in her stomach picking up right where his fingers left off, or maybe where they left off hours before when she had finally let her eyes close, half sprawled against him and completely unable to move.  He doesn’t say anything now in answer, no more than he had then, his mouth pressed to her forehead and his hand smoothing over her back again and again.

It had taken him a while that last time, his expression drawn tight until he had buried his face in her neck and she had urged him on with hot whispers against his ear and her hands grabbing at his back, his skin heated and flushed, she was sure, with his effort even though she couldn’t see it in the dark.  It’s drawn-out now, too, but different.  Relaxed and something nearly leisurely about how he moves in her, his lips touching her eyebrow, her temple, and her fingers walking up and down his sides.

“Secondary photonic-“

“I understand,” Spock says and she wraps her legs over his waist, hooks her arms under his and hauls him down to her, smiling against his ear and then biting at it once, gently, to get him to catch his breath like he does.

She can’t see his face when he comes, but she can feel it in how his body tightens against hers, her own pleasure surging up and breaking over her, through her, sweeping her along, leaving them catching their breath and her once again lolling back into the mattress, her limbs too heavy and her pulse a quick, rapid beat down deep inside of her.

“Good morning,” she whispers to him, letting her fingers sift through his hair on the pretense of smoothing it.

“I will be back in a moment,” he tells her, though he doesn’t move right away and she doesn’t let go of him, not until he breathes out something much like a sigh and sits back from her.

His absence leaves her lying in the middle of his bed with her skin still too heated, staring around his quarters in the sudden silence and solitude.  She should have asked him how long that meant, she thinks as the door slides shut behind him, his hands still tugging down his shirt down to his waist.   A moment as in he would hurry to the bridge and right back, as rushed as he had dressed, or a moment in that it would take longer than it did last night, or a moment like he has other duties to attend to now that morning has come.

That, though, is not something she wants to think about particularly hard.  Not when the alternative is to leave his lights on as low as they have been, and not when the last thing she wants to contemplate is the world beyond his door, that bright slice of the corridor that he had disappeared into.

It’s better to spread her hand over her stomach and tug the other one through her tangled hair, surveying their clothes still scattered on the floor and the twist of the sheets and his bedspread, how one of the pillows is at a slight angle.  She closes her eyes when she catches sight of her bag sitting against the wall, lets out a breath and scratches at her stomach, sure that she needs to get up but wanting to linger for just another minute, and another after that, now matter how the thought of the day is pulling at her with the need to do something about their clothes, his bed, the fact she’s up at Spacedock and not in the library, and probably something about her hair, too, and the dried sweat prickling across her skin.

She turns the sonics down to their lowest setting in his small shower, wishing for hot water instead of the press of them against her too sensitive skin.  Still, she stays in there longer than she probably needs to, too tired to get herself to move.  Or maybe it’s not exhaustion, really, the feeling so different than other Sunday mornings, but a languor, a lassitude that seems to have seeped down into her very bones and nestled there next to the warmth of his quarters and how she’s sure even when she shuts the sonics off, she can still smell his skin on hers.  She wonders if that heaviness will still be there when she gets back to Earth, when she organizes her readings for the week, and when she’s back in her own bed, the lights turned off and the stars above her, blocked by the ceiling and the top floors of her dorm, the roof and the fog of the city and layers and layers of atmosphere, the miles and miles between her bed and where she is now.  

Maybe.  Or not.  She touches the edge of his sink, sure that all of this will feel farther away than a quick trip down to the planet, a break in the busyness of her life, which will resume the moment she gets back, with the routine of her schedule waiting for her, the fabric of her cadet uniform, the paths crisscrossing campus from classroom building to mess hall to her dorm, an endless web stretching out in front of her for two more years.

She’s pulling on her underwear and trying to decide whether to do something about the state of his bed or if it’s easier to just leave it how it is, so that he can fix it if he wants to, can neaten it and straighten the pile of sheets, when his comm buzzes on his desk.  She watches it vibrate, the screen lit up in the still dim-room as she finishes dressing, smoothing her uniform down her stomach, her eyes still on it as the noise pierces through the room.

It falls silent after another moment, giving off a single last chime indicating a missed call, and the screen darkens, leaving the room silent once more until she tells the computer to turn up the lights.

She tries to make out what time it is from the fall of sunlight on the planet below her, knowing that she could ask the computer but not wanting to give it reason to talk to her again, not when she still wants to dig her finger into the corner of her eye and yawn at the abrupt wake up.  Instead, she tries to remember what time the sun rises in San Francisco, and what time it would make it now, the edge of light so near to the city.

Spock’s comm buzzes again and she’s turning towards it to watch it vibrate on his desk when the door whisks open.

She takes the mug he holds out to her and cradles it against her chest with both hands as he examines the ID on the screen before setting a plate he’s holding onto his desk and thumbing off the call, sending it to his voicemail, she presumes, or maybe declining it all together, quiet descending once again, broken only by the soft click of his own mug when he sets it on the desk.

“It really is blue,” she says, examining her coffee instead of asking who called him - twice - early on Sunday morning.  She turns her mug to better see it under the light, the liquid a deep, royal blue, no matter that the scent is the same as what’s served from the Academy replicators.

“It is not so vibrant as it was.”

“Olson never fixed it?”

“Many attempts were made,” he says as his eyes fall on his comm again, though he doesn’t reach for it.

“Good to know you won’t be shipping out too soon,” she says, taking a sip.  “Not with haywire inducers and oddly colored beverages.”

“The replicators on the Potemkin were only capable of serving decaffeinated coffee after a malfunction of their gravitronic replication transmitter.  You should be appreciative it is only the color that is the issue.”

“The horror,” she says, taking another sip and leaning back against the bulkhead next to the window, listening to the near perfect silence of the room when neither of them is speaking.  She wonders if anyone is on board yet, if there’s a daytime shift of workers no matter that it’s Sunday morning, if when the door opens again  there will be an officer walking by, or a group of them even, going about their days.

“It is not protein bars,” he says, nodding to the plate, then reaching out and adjusting it so that it sits more perfectly centered in the space left between his comm and the edge of his desk.  “Though likely not substantially better.”

“Am I in for a world of hurt when it comes to ship’s food?” she asks, walking over to his desk and examining the two muffins he brought.  She feels for a moment like they’re staring up at her from their plate that matches the mugs in its bland design, a durable, thick plastic that’s intended to look like ceramic though it certainly doesn’t feel the same, yet another breakfast after the handful of them they’ve already shared together.  He’s standing right next to her, close enough to touch.  She has her fingers wrapped around her mug like they possibly need to be warmed after a night spent in the heat of his quarters, his body pressed against hers.  She nudges her elbow into his arm, stares back at the muffins.  “Do I need to rethink my entire career plan?”

“The offerings are not normally so insipid.”

“Insipid,” she repeats, uncurling a hand from her mug and breaking off a piece of the one closest to her.  She leans back against his desk as he sits at his chair, sipping at his own mug of what looks like tea and taking apart his own muffin with the same care that he does everything, barely scattering any crumbs on the plate and certainly none on the desk.  “Nice word.”

She’s halfway through her coffee and trying to come up with something to talk to him about, some words to fill in the quiet that has descended, a quiet that is not uneasy but which she wouldn’t mind breaking, when his comm rings for a third time, right next to her, nearly humming against her hip.  The vibration travels up her fingers as she hands it to him, not letting herself look at the screen and focusing on trying to eat a bite of muffin as neatly as he does when, after holding his comm for a moment, he flips the casing open and pushes the button to accept the call.

“Hello,” he says and she doesn’t think she’s imagining how he’s turned slightly away from her.

She sips at her tea and tries to keep her focus on her mug.

“Hi sweetie,” she hears and buries the smile that instantly threatens in her coffee, the one that only grows as he shifts further away from her.  “I missed you earlier.  Is now a bad time?”

“It is not ideal,” he says and she points to herself and then the door, already pushing up off his desk, already wiping her fingers clean and tugging her skirt down when his hand falls to her knee.  He shakes his head, his fingers tightening into a grip that’s strong enough to keep her there.

“Are you working?”

“I have a meeting with the Captain at 1130,” he says instead of answering which only makes Nyota smile again.  His hand is still resting there and when she leans back against his desk again, he gives her a slight squeeze and still doesn’t let go.  “May I call you back afterwards?”

“That would be fine,” Amanda says, and then adds, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“You have your meeting,” Nyota says, after he and his mother both say goodbye, the comm folded and set on the desk again.  She’s still holding her mug cupped in both hands and trying to focus on how his fingers are still tracing over her knee.  She studies the way his thumb is moving against her skin and then covers his hand with her own, letting that warm prickle spread up and into her fingers, across her palm like it always does, so familiar now.

“You are occupied?”

“No,” she says too quickly, because she does have things to do, a long list of tasks to finish for the start of the week.  It’s easy to forget, being up here away from everything.  “Later.  Tonight, I have a study group.”

The idea seems so distant, like another life entirely from how his thumb keeps working over her kneecap, his knuckles bumping into her palm as his fingers trace over her skin.

“Of course,” he says, not moving from his chair and not moving his hand so she stays there too, unwilling to take the last sip of her coffee no matter that it’s growing cold since she’ll feel like she’ll have to set aside her mug if it’s empty and she’s not sure what she would do after that.  Move the plate aside, too, and maybe pick her clothes off of his floor, the beginning of a series of events that will lead her to shouldering her bag.

“So,” she gets out.  The day seems too unstructured, too precarious in its ability to tip this way or that and she continues to not finish her coffee as the last of the steam rises in a tiny curl, lets it grow cooler as she pulls in a breath, lets it out and still doesn’t raise her mug to take the final sip.  “Do you-“

“If you would like-“

“What?” she asks when he doesn’t continue.

“If you are available,” he says.  “And amenable, I have something I would like to show you.”

“You have time?” she asks, working her toes into the carpet.  She taps lightly at the back of his hand, studying him.  “I don’t want to keep you.”

“I do,” he says and she lets her finger edge under the cuff of his sleeve, runs her nail over his wrist beneath those silver, double stripes.  “For the remainder of the morning.  However, if you-“

“Yes,” she says immediately, not bothering to hesitate, not bothering to do anything other than squeeze his hand and let him take her mug and set it next to his own.  “I would love to.”

She can’t help but stare around herself in Engineering when he leads her there through corridors that are still quiet and empty, catching the amusement he tries to hide from his expression as she gapes at the size of the space, the enormous struts, and the machinery working around them.  Above them, a turbine whirls water around and she can’t help but watch it as they pass under it, trying to name the other equipment they walk by.  Over there are the resonance chambers for the comm sensors, and beyond them a line of torpedo stations, set near a wall of windows that she’s pretty sure look over the shuttlecraft bay, though they don’t get close enough for her to be able to check.  Instead, he brings her deeper into the room, the supports changing from yellow to white, and more wires and conduits running all over the walls, into computer terminals and behind glass doorways covered in warning labels.  It’s all almost overwhelming, the amount of equipment around them that she barely has an idea of as to how they function, and the surety that Spock moves through it with, the set of his shoulders and how he weaves through machinery she can’t name in a way that is entirely more confident than he ever is on Earth.

“I thought you might be interested,” he says when he stops in front of a console covered in warning labels, a thick black and yellow striped decal surrounding a keypad.

“In?” she asks before she has a chance to look past him at a lever set into a pipe that runs the length of the wall, the paint on it slightly mismatched, like it’s been repainted with a color that is close to the same as what surrounds it, but not close enough.  “Is that-?”

She points, then taps at it, turning back over her shoulder to let her eyes rake over his side and at his hand, now typing a code into the keypad.  There’s no scar, no discernible mark that she can see or feel, nothing to ever let her know that all of that happened if she hadn’t been there for it, his skin shiny green and too taut.

“This is infamous,” she says, tapping at it again.

“I do not believe that word can be applied to an inanimate object.”

“Legendary,” she says.  “The fabled valve.  Puri still lets you come down here?  He doesn’t have security posted?  Or do you conveniently not mention that you happen to spend your Sunday mornings visiting your favorite newly replaced o-ring?”

“I would appreciate your discretion on the matter,” he says, still bent over the keypad so she can’t see that curl that she’s sure is sitting at the corner of his mouth.

“He might get me to talk with enough fajitas and drinks,” she tells him, still examining the valve.  “That was a great dinner.”

“It is fortunate, then, that you did not pursue a career in Starfleet Intelligence if your silence is so easily compromised.”

“You don’t know that being a xenoling major isn’t my cover,” she says, coming to stand behind him as the keypad blinks from red to green and he twists a handle recessed into a round housing.  She can hear catches releasing as he pulls, a hiss accompanying a few whips of what looks like steam but might just be condensation.  When the cloud of vapor clears, he’s holding a clear glass case, a fist sized crystal suspended within it.

She wants to move closer to it to see more clearly but still isn’t sure that she should be reaching for it like her hands keep threatening to, so she clasps them together except that the itch is still in her fingers, so she rests them on his waist instead.  She spent all night touching him, her hands greedy for his skin, searching and grabbing and it feels different now, the fabric of his uniform jersey and his undershirt between them, the harsh lights and the white of Engineering around them and the occasional beep, not the rustle of blankets and the sounds of their mouths.

Still, it’s better than grabbing for the container he’s holding so carefully and she lets her thumbs move over the shape of his ribs, up and back down the hard ridge of them, his heart a fast patter under her palm.

“Is it satisfactory?”

“I don’t think I knew what to expect,” she says, still rubbing at his ribs.  “But yes.  Very much so.”

“It is not what you anticipated?”

She stares at the crystal, so innocuous and really quite a bit smaller than she might have thought it would be, hanging there in its casing, winking at them dully, no shine to it other than a lackluster burnish, somehow less impressive than she might have guessed it would be.

“Better,” she tells him.

He rests the housing on the bulkhead so that he can cover her hand on his waist with his own, his fingers tangling with hers.

“I agree.”

She rests her cheek on his arm, smiles into the fabric of his sleeve and can’t help but dig her fingers lightly into his sides.  “Though I kind of thought it’d be bigger.”

“Perhaps we should inform the Ambassador of your displeasure.”

“Or we just need to coax another one out of her,” she says.  “Back up crystals.  We can stack them three high.”

“You are aware that this is a sufficient amount of dilithium to-“

“I am,” she says and smiles into his arm.  To her surprise, instead of correcting her again or going into the specifics of antimatter reactions, or telling her that she’s being illogical in that way that he has that seems to always make her smile, probably even wider than she’s doing now, he rests the casing against the panel so that he can take her hand in his, holding it loosely between them as he faces her.

“Nyota,” he says, a tiny tickle skating across her skin, one that pricks and nearly trembles.  She thinks that he’s going to take a step towards her but he doesn’t, just holds her hand like that for a long moment, the machines humming around them and the cavernous room as empty and quiet as it has been so that the sound of him swallowing seems overly loud despite the whirr of the ship.  “You have not changed your plans to apply to the Enterprise, correct?”

She feels her forehead crease and her mouth twist into a small smile.  “No.  Never.”

“And if a more senior position is available on a different ship?”

She shakes her head, realizing that she’s done so before she really decided to.  But it’s not a motion she wants to correct, not one that she would take back, not standing with her hand engulfed in his in the middle of Engineering, deep inside the ship that she’s dreamed of for so long now, and not with him looking at her how he is, his eyes tracing over her face as she answers as simply as she knows how.  “It’s not here.”  

“You are certain?”

For as easy as her answer is, it takes her two tries to get it out, the first making her swallow, her mouth entirely too dry.  It’s his touch, she thinks, that hot dry press of his palm, that tickle that always spreads over her skin, through her hand and arm and leaves her wanting more of it.

“I,” she says, squeezing his fingers, feeling his grip tighten on her hand in response, sure that she could spend a lot longer having him watch her like that than the time that they have left until his meeting, until she needs to go back to Earth, until their lives restart and they’re back to the rest of their weeks.  “Did not help you get those dilithium crystals for nothing.”

She thinks, at first, that the pitch in her stomach is some latent response to everything that’s happened since she got to the ship, some childlike excitement that is welling up in her.  It keeps growing, though, warm and thick like downing a spoonful of hot soup, or the first swallow of tea, or the feel of sunshine on her face after too long indoors, but pulsing down inside of her, deeper than where her blood flows or her heart beats.

His eyes close and then open again, his gaze soft and gentle until the lazy motion over her fingers he’s started up abruptly stops and his eyes widen.  He pulls back like he’s realized what he’s doing, his hand beginning to slip away from hers.

“Don’t,” she murmurs, fumbling to grab at his fingers and keep his hand there, feeling heavy and graceless in her attempts, focused instead on trying to savor that heady thrum.

He relaxes slowly, first the tension in his arm ebbing and then his hand gentling on hers.  She can still feel it but it’s more distant now, fainter and less distinct.  She wants to tell him to keep going, that she likes it, that a blossoming, blooming, spreading feeling of comfort is nothing other than welcome, but his eyes are tracking over her face in a way that keeps her quiet.

“You are entirely certain?”

“Yes,” she says and nods, too, like he needs that confirmation and maybe he does because he’s still gripping her hand, still hasn’t moved from where he’s braced the container on the bulkhead, is still just watching her.  It makes her smile at him, or maybe it’s his touch that does that, the hot tingle that seems to be everywhere inside of her causing her to take a step towards him, to tip her head back and stare up at him, so close to her like he is.  “But on one condition.”

“What is it?”

She tugs at his hand, smiles wider.  “You have to get a chair.”

“I have a chair,” he says and he’s not really smiling back, but his eyes are bright and she’s pretty sure she could spend all day looking at that shine in them.

“A chair that is not a desk chair,” she corrects, still smiling.

“While I know that you find the remainder of the Academy to be daunting, I find it fortunate that perhaps we have sufficient time to peruse all available furniture options.”  He pauses, his fingers still stroking over hers.  “If, that is, you are interested in doing so.”

“I’ve been told I need to cultivate a life outside of work, so I think I could be talked into it.”

“I have other pursuits I could suggest as well.”

“Like looking at end tables?  Lamps?” she asks as he replaces the canister, the latches clicking back into place and the keypad giving a beep as he taps another code into it.  “Maybe we could present our findings to Puri.”  She grins at his back, let’s herself imagine that, let’s herself imagine all of it, everything about a future that she can now clearly begin to picture, one that has for so long been indistinct and is now nearly taking shape in a way that she can begin to make it out, lines filling in, sharpening the longer she stands there taking him in, right there in front of her, her hand still warm from his touch.  All of her is, really, down in her stomach and her chest and beneath that, still, bubbling and rich with a thick, sweet happiness.  “I’ll have to have you show me the quarters on the ship so I can see where I might be living someday.”

He turns to look at her over his shoulder.  “You will not, likely, be able to apply knowledge of available furniture to such a space.”

“Is it a glorified closet?”

“Glorified might be a misnomer.”

“Will I have to have a roommate?”

“It is possible.”

“I’m going to have to oust Hawkins, aren’t I.”

“Due to the track record of your success in professional matters,” he says as he turns to face her more fully,  “I may advise him to begin looking for other employment in the near future.”

“I wouldn’t really do that, he’s a nice guy, I’ll just hang out in your quarters,” she says before she can think about it.

“Very well,” he answers just as quickly, just as pat and simple before silence falls between them, his eyes brown and soft as he stares at her.

“If that’s ok,” she adds.

“It is.”

She stares back at him, resisting the urge to look around the room again, sure that it will disappear, that all of this is too much, too good and too close to being true, a future that she has always thought of, had half created in her mind now nearly tangible, hanging bright and incandescent in front of her.

His eyes are still locked on hers and then they’re too close to focus on as he shifts towards her, his kiss firmer than she was expecting, his hand rising to frame her face.  She kisses him back as his thumb sweeps over her cheek and only pulls away when she has to draw in a breath.  He chases her mouth and kisses her again, which leaves her smiling against his lips, that same happiness breaking in hot waves through her, refusing to ebb the longer they stay there like that, his fingers warm on her cheek and his lips tugging at hers.

“What else would you like to see?” he asks as he breaks their kiss, before she can even begin to gather herself.  “The communications bay?”

“Definitely,” she whispers, his hand still cupping her cheek.

“Sickbay?”

“Yes.”

“The storage decks?”

“Absolutely.”

“Jeffries tube A-13?”

“Everything,” she says.  

“May I kiss you again?”

It makes her smile and makes her reach for him, grab his shirt in both hands and pull him forward.  “Yes.”

His thumb smooths over her cheekbone and he shifts close enough that she has to tip her head back for him.

“I want to see everything,” she whispers when he pulls back.  She doesn’t let go of him right away, not when she can hold him so close for another moment.  “Absolutely everything.”

…

Her room is empty when she gets back to it, no sign of Gaila anywhere, just her bed unmade and a bra laying in the middle of the floor.  Nyota toes it aside and slips her bag off her shoulder and onto the foot of her bed, trying to decide if she wants to bother with a late lunch or not.  She had walked back from the transport station rather than taking a bus, and had taken the long way, winding her way around the far edges of campus rather that walking through it, where the streets were quieter and there were fewer cadets and officers to run into.  It had been nice, nearly as peaceful as her room is now, the city slightly hushed early on a Sunday afternoon.

She sits on her bed for a moment, before standing again and unpacking her things, tossing her laundry in her hamper and putting her toothbrush back in the bathroom, and replacing her bag in the closet.  She pulls off her uniform and holds it, working her thumb over the fabric before adding it to the hamper.  She has work to prepare for tomorrow, no matter how much she got done yesterday, and not that much time to do it in if she also wants to get to the gym and to bed at a decent time, so there’s not really a chance to have taken the walk that she did, and spent the entirety of her morning on the ship, and then to also be standing in the middle of her room.

She ignores the rumbling in her stomach as she sits at her desk and pulls her padd towards her, flicking it on to where she had left it the day before when she had given up on work to shower and change for the evening.  Her Cardassian notes are still there, right where she left them, bulleted and color coded and waiting to be reviewed for her midterm.

She rubs at her forehead, picks up her stylus, puts it down again and reaches for her Orthography work instead.  It swims in front of her eyes, though, and it takes her a long time to actually read any of the chapters she has left to review, rather than just letting her eyes scan over the words and letting herself scroll through it like she’s absorbing it, when her mind is still wandering the corridors of the ship, remembering each and every thing that Spock pointed out to her.

It takes a moment of having her eyes closed, a deep breath in and then out again to get herself to focus, to lose herself in the reading like she normally does, so that she barely registers the afternoon ticking by.  

It’s her stomach growling again that brings her back to herself, her hand already covering it before the sound has finished.  She checks the time, sighs louder than she probably needs to, and sits back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling and wanting to let out a loud groan that she won’t allow herself, not when there’s no point in getting frustrated at the amount she still has to read and the fact that the day has edged into evening.

She lets her eyes squeeze shut and tries to remind herself of what Spock said, that it’s not really that much longer of this, not at all.  Three and a half semesters and then her work will be different, at least.  Maybe not less hours per week and maybe not easier, but she’ll be up there, not in here at a desk in her dorm in the middle of campus, faced with papers and tests.

Her comm rings while she still has her eyes closed and she nearly ignores it, sure that it’s Gaila or Kirk or someone else, someone who wants to ask a question about the readings or an upcoming assignment, and she’s not entirely sure that she can take that.  

She’s even more sure that if she lets it go to her voicemail, she likely won’t listen to it, will let it linger there, ignored because the thought of checking the message and calling whoever it is back will balloon upwards in her mind until it’d be nearly impossible to accomplish, so she makes herself reach out and blindly flick her comm open.

“I have your shirt,” Spock says and her eyes snap open.

“My what?” she asks, sitting upright.  “What?  Hi.”

“Your shirt,” he repeats.  “It was entangled with- I believe it was easily overlooked.”

She gives her hamper a long look, like she could possibly see through it, could see whether she actually has all of her belongings, the ones she had grabbed off his floor as he showered.  The kiss he had given her when she had left had smelled like soap and like shaving cream again, his cheek smooth under her fingers.  She had let her hand linger there, not all that sure she wanted to find her way back through Spacedock, not when she could stand on her toes and kiss him again.

“Sorry,” she says automatically, smiles, and adds, “Though I’m sure it’s of no-“

“It is of-“

She laughs into the silence that follows him cutting himself off, bites at her lip and pushes her padd away across her desk so she can rest her elbows where it was, her comm placed carefully between them.

“Are you coming back tonight?” she asks.  “I can come over and grab it.”

“No,” he says before she can begin to picture walking over to his apartment, the thought forming and then dissipating in the sound of his single syllable, taking with it a sigh she didn’t know she was going to let out until she has.  “Unfortunately.”

She nods, tracing her finger over the edge of her desk.  “Some other time.”

“At your convenience.”

“Yeah,” she says and nods and he’s not there, he’s never there when she does that, nods like he can see her, as if his eyes will be on her like they so often are whenever they’re together, his attention steady in a way that she used to think was too intense and now feels entirely different.  Warm, is the only way she can think about, like how his touch is, his hand repeatedly returning to her arm to point out yet another aspect of the ship to her as he guided her around, his fingers finding her elbow over and over.  “I’ll see you at work, then.”

“On Tuesday,” he says and she wants to ask him what he’s doing all day tomorrow, how it is that he spends his Mondays that he’s not with her, but the idea of it makes her too tired.  It’s how little she slept last night, probably, the hours that they kept each other up now dragging at her, or maybe it’s the thought of the rest of her homework that she has to finish, or maybe it’s the promise of her alarm clock in the morning, early enough that she’ll have time to go through her reading again before class, to look over her notes and make sure everything is fresh in her mind so that she can get the most out of her lectures and seminars as is possible.

“Do you want to get lunch?” she asks before she’s thought the question through, before she even knew she was going to ask it, and then without thinking better of it, without taking the time to pause and figure out any part of what she’s saying, she adds, “Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Ok,” she says and nods again even though she’s pretty sure she hasn’t bothered with lunch on a Monday all semester, has gone from class to the library to class again, and then to what was Machesky’s office to do his grading and what is now Spock’s office to do the same, no matter that he’s never there.  And then more work, always, all night, achingly long into the evening so that the start of her week seems interminably long, something to hold her breath, put her head down and get through as best as she can.  “I’m done with Sociolinguistics at 1300.”

It’s late, she knows, and his lunch break is probably earlier, and she’s pretty sure that the Computer Science department is on a different schedule anyway, most of their lab work scheduled for the afternoon, if that’s what he’s even doing tomorrow, and if not then faculty meetings and whatever goes on at HQ is on its own timetable, one that’s nearly entirely separate from the Academy.  She picks at the edge of her desk, makes herself stop, and then starts again until he says, “I am available.”

“Good.”  She rubs her hands quickly over her thighs, smiles at her comm.  “I’ll see you then.”

“Have a pleasant evening,” he says.

“I will,” she tells him before she folds her comm closed, resting her chin in her hand as she continues to smile down at it.

“How was it last night?” Gaila asks as she breezes in a moment later, dumping a pile of padds onto her bed so that half of them slide onto the floor.  “You missed a good game, I won all of Kirk’s socks and as far as I know, McCoy hasn’t broken down and lent him any yet.”

“Perfect,” Nyota says, tucking her hands under her thighs, then drawing her feet up onto the chair even though it’s a tight fit.  She wraps her arms around her legs, resting her cheek where Spock’s hand was that morning, when his fingers were circling her kneecap.  “It was perfect.”


	39. Chapter 39

“So they have these computer terminals,” Nyota starts, only to have Gaila’s loud groan cut her off.

“What?” Gaila asks stopping in the middle of the path and spinning on her heel, her curls flying behind her.  “They have computers?  On the ship?  That you can use?  Real ones?  Wow.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“You stop it.  Nyota, this has been going on since last night.  My ears are bleeding and trust me, I love computers so you know how bad this is.”

“But Gaila-“

“Nope,” Gaila says.  “How many times did you two have sex?  I need some of the good stuff if I have to hear another word about your favorite ship.”

“Stop,” Nyota says, dropping her voice in the hope that Gaila will do the same, the quad too crowded for how Gaila’s holding up her hand and putting up one finger, and then two, and then a third.

“Stop me when I get to the right number,” she says, starting in on her other hand.  Nyota drags them both down, tugging at Gaila’s sleeves and looking around to see if anyone has noticed.

“Toes, too?” Gaila asks.

“Fine, if you don’t want to listen, I won’t tell you all about the warp drive.  And the impulse engines, Gaila, you should have seen them.”

“You know, I did want to listen for the first several hours, and even the next few, and I might have found the will to keep paying attention after that if you could just give me one little detail about the rest of your night.”

“No.”

“I think you’re forgetting how much fun this was supposed to be for me.”

“I think you’re forgetting-”

“And I think you’re forgetting this was all my idea in the first place,” Gaila says.  “And therefore-“

“No, therefore,” Nyota says, before Gaila can begin to build up a head of steam, her mouth already open in what Nyota is sure will be a too-loud explanation of every morsel of information about her weekend that Gaila feels owed.  “I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Lunch.”

“With who?”

“Whom,” Nyota corrects.

“This one’s yours,” Gaila says and when Nyota turns to see who Gaila’s speaking to, Spock is right behind her in his instructor’s uniform instead of his science blues that she last saw him in, his hand full of a stack of padds and his eyes on her.  She can’t quite help the jump in her stomach at the sight of him, not with him there so suddenly when she was sure she still had a walk across campus to meet up with him, and not how close he is, near enough that she could reach out and touch him, just there where his jacket tugs against the curve of muscle of his arm.

“Hi,” she says, running her thumb under the strap of her bag.

“Nyota wants to know if you heard any of that,” Gaila says.

“I do not,” she says, brushing her ponytail back over her shoulder and giving him a small smile, wishing that the fast patter of her heart that has just started up wouldn’t have, not when she saw him all weekend and not when she knew she’s meeting him now, and not when she’s run into him on the quad so many times that it should be normal, entirely and utterly commonplace, except that the hammer of her pulse is nothing ordinary, nor how her stomach flips over when his eyes dart from Gaila back to her again.

“Heard what, precisely?” he asks.  The breeze is shifting through his hair and flattening his jacket against his shoulder and side and she’s not sure if he’s squinting against the sun or just at Gaila in general.

“Good,” Gaila says.  “She knows where I sleep.”

“Obviously,” Spock says, his expression tightening further.

“Have a really fun lunch,” Gaila says to Nyota all too seriously, in a way that makes Nyota want to close her eyes and sigh, and want to press her hand to her stomach to quell the quavering, watery dance that it’s doing.  “Which you will.  Obviously.”

“I think I’m lucky that she never took any xenoling electives,” Nyota says as they watch Gaila walk off towards the Engineering building.  She pulls her bag up her shoulder again, leaving her thumb hooked under the strap instead of reaching to touch her hair again, or maybe her earring, sure that if she gives her hands free rein they won’t behave and stay still, but will twitch and tic with all the energy pent up inside of herself, looking for a place to go.  “I don’t know if the department could handle her.”

“Her Computer Sciences professors are quite complementary,” he says, as collected as ever as he shifts his padds to his other hand, his voice smooth and even.

“They don’t have to live with her.”

Trying to will away that quivering spark inside of her doesn’t work and instead seems to make it set up residence, down deep where it feels destined to stay now that he’s with her, making her adjust her bag again even though she doesn’t need to and then rub her hands together in what she realizes too late is a slightly odd gesture, so she lets them hang at her sides until they feel too empty and holds onto her bag once more.  “Where do you want to eat?”

“I have no preference.”

“Ok,” she says to fill the silence left after his answer, the quiet that hangs between them as his eyes scan the buildings surrounding the quad.  She feels a bit like her mind is wheeling with places that they could go, trying to work through the available options and rejecting all of them in turn since she hardly wants to brave the crowds of the mess hall with him and the student union only has replicators and she’s not sure of how long he has in the first place, before he has to get on with his day.  

A group of fourth years pass by them, students that Nyota recognizes from some of the advanced seminars she’s taken, one of them giving her a small wave which she returns with a smile.  They don’t stop to chat, just keep walking towards the library, she’s pretty sure, from the direction they’re headed.

“How was your morning?” she asks as she starts walking the other way, Spock falling into step beside her and he must really not care where they go because he doesn’t point out that everywhere to eat on campus is being left behind them the further they walk.

“Acceptable.  I obtained this for you,” he says and hands her a filmplast from the stack of padds he has under his arm.  “Yourself?”

“Long.  Already,” she says.  Sociolinguistics seemed interminably drawn out that morning, the time ticking by slower than she would have thought possible as she struggled to listen and to take notes, rather than give into the urge to watch the clock and count down the minutes until the lecture would end.  “I don’t know how that happens.”

“Perhaps you should review the theories of relativity put forth in your Introduction to Astrophysics course.”

“Or look forward to when I’ve completed all the Comparative Sociolinguistic classes,” she says, wrinkling her nose at the thought of the one that she has left, on the schedule for next semester and filling up her Thursday afternoons all winter and spring.

“I was under the impression you found it enjoyable.”

“I do, I do,” she says, examining the filmplast and trying to make sense of what’s on it, which is hard because his arm brushes against hers once and then twice.

“I understand.”

“Don’t tell Lieutenant Commander Haught,” she says, turning the filmplast this way and that, the sun shining on it making it hard to read.

“I will not.”

“This is…” she starts, squinting down at it and then at her elbow when Spock takes it to keep her from crossing the street without looking up for any traffic, his touch going straight through her.  His hand on her, warm through the sleeve of her uniform, is nearly enough to distract her from what she’s reading, a list of sensor malfunctions and frequency interferences and system crashes, bracketed by notes to program each scenario in a dozen different languages in what she guesses is Hawkin’s writing.

“I presume you are already competent in the pertinent dialects?”

“I need to brush up on Aulcanian,” she murmurs, jogging to catch up with him as he crosses the street, her attention split between the list of languages and how his uniform shifts against his back when he rearranges the padds in his hand again.

“Based on your current rate of language acquisition, you will be able to do so in the time it takes us to procure lunch,” he says and when she looks up to poke his arm, maybe, or just squeeze it, or roll her eyes at him and probably smile at the same time, he’s stopped on the sidewalk.

“You’ve been here?” she asks though she’s nearly sure that he wouldn’t have eaten at the deli he’s staring at, not if Puri didn’t drag him to it, since he certainly hasn’t been there with her.

Except that she recognizes this stretch of street and the way that her school bag weighs on her shoulder feels familiar too, or maybe it’s how he’s standing there in the sun and maybe it’s how the sight of his profile as he studies the door and the windows and the handful of people finishing up their lunches inside causes her stomach to flutter and makes her look around, take all of it in and immediately frown.

“This is new,” she says needlessly, because he’s already nodding.  “Where’d that cafe go?”

“Unclear.”

She keeps staring at the door until Spock opens it for her and ushers her through with his hand on her back, pushing at her lightly as she keeps staring around the now unfamiliar space.

“They changed it all around,” she says as they walk towards the counter, which is at an angle to where it was.  The tables are different too, set up in an unfamiliar arrangement, and the walls are painted, she’s pretty sure, the color lighter so that the room looks much bigger and a lot brighter than it seemed before.  “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“This is acceptable,” he says from beside her.

“You’re sure?” she asks even though they’re already inside, and it smells amazing, and she can’t remember the last time she ate lunch somewhere other than in the mess hall, but she’s not entirely sure what she had in mind when she suggested that they eat together and she’s not certain that this is it.

It doesn’t seem to matter, though, because Spock is continuing towards the counter, leaving her no choice but to follow.  

The boards with the menu are gone from where they used to hang on the wall, a filmplast sitting on the counter instead.  When she picks it up and Spock moves behind her to read it over her shoulder, she folds it close to her chest, then lays it face down next to where a bored looking Bajoran is watching them, ready to take their order.

“He’ll have the vegetarian pho,” she tells him before Spock can reach for the menu like she knows he wants to with how he’s still standing there, now with his eyebrow raised which makes her mouth twitch.  “And I’ll have the banh mi with seared tofu.”

“Together?” the Bajoran asks.

She turns to look up at Spock behind her, unable to keep a smile from growing, the eyebrow that he only raises higher warming her just as much as the nearness of his body does against her back.

“Want to have an argument about who’s going to pay?”

“I presume that with the frequency with which you engage in the topic, it is a favorite of yours and as such, I would not wish to dissuade you from doing so.”

“You just want another chance to tell me how big your salary is,” she says as she pulls out her wallet, moving aside her padd to do so and fishing down in the bottom of her bag for it. “It’s really very suave, Spock, nothing but smooth.”

“It has a hundred percent success rate.  You are still here,” he says and she lets out a laugh before she can stop herself, lets herself touch him, the fabric of his uniform soft and his forearm firm and hot beneath it, keeps him there next to her as she gets her credit chip back, when he hasn’t been that close to her since yesterday, what feels like entirely too long ago now.

He chooses a table by the window as she gathers napkins and silverware.  The sun reflects off the padds he sets down and falls over him as he sits, bringing out the gray in his uniform jacket and how pale his skin is against it, where the cuff of his sleeve ends at his slim wrist and where the collar lays against his neck.  She’s still smiling, still half forming a response to him, sure that she can get the corner of his mouth to curl, that she can get that spark to flare in his eyes, the one she knows he’ll never admit to, a brightness to his expression that’s better than anything that the sun could bring out.

“Nyota?” he asks and she shakes herself back into motion, pulls out the chair across from him before realizing she hasn’t set her bag down yet and stands again to do so.

“Thanks for this,” she says, smoothing her palms over the filmplast.

“Hawkins said the simulator would be ready early next semester.”

“Sounds good,” she says and thinks that they maybe should have chosen a different table because it’s hard not to watch how long his eyelashes look when he blinks against the light streaming through the window.

She realizes a beat too late that the Bajoran is standing next to their table with their food and sits in her chair again only to have to lean forward again to pick up the filmplast to make room for her plate.  She busies herself slipping it into her bag before pausing to wonder if Spock intended her to keep it, only to realize that she’s already closed her bag and it would be nearly too strange to pull it back out again.

“If you would like, I will reserve an hour for you when it is available,” he says as he examines his lunch.  When she doesn’t answer he looks up at her, that eyebrow of his quirking slightly.  “Two hours?  Three?”

“Eat your food,” she tells him, sinking back into her chair and watching as he slowly stirs his soup, steam escaping and rising up in a long unfolding curl.  She waits long enough for him to take a single spoonful before leaning across the table towards him.  “How is it?”

He dips his spoon into the soup again, his eyes on the liquid and not on her, no matter that she nearly feels like they are, that attention of his still directed at her no matter where he’s looking.  “Your insistence on hearing my opinions is disruptive to the act of forming one.”

She gives him a slight grimace, one that he doesn’t see as he stirs his spoon though his bowl again.  “Not your favorite?”

“I did not say that.”

She holds out half of her sandwich to him.  “Want to try some?”

It’s an effort to try to keep her stomach from fluttering when his fingers graze hers as he takes it, and it’s even harder to not watch how he turns it back and forth in those large hands of his before taking a bite of what is mostly tofu and none of the toppings.

“Acceptable,” he says and wipes his hands off after giving it back.

“Better or worse than yours?”

“An inapplicable question as they are hardly comparable.”

“You can just say that you like mine more,” she says, trying to not watch how his fingers hold his spoon.  “I won’t tell.”

“Tell whom?” he asks as he fishes out a bean sprout that’s floating on top of his soup and she opens her mouth to answer before narrowing her eyes at him, at how he hasn’t looked up and how he’s too carefully taking a bite and at how when she ducks forward and catches his eye, he just raises an eyebrow.

“I should have let you pay,” she says, staring at him for another long moment before shaking her head.  “You heard all of that, didn’t you?  To think I was going to offer you more of my sandwich.”

“I do not know to what you are referring,” he says lightly and when she kicks at his shin under the table, the corner of his mouth twitches around the bite he’s taking.

There was a time that she could eat lunch with him and not spend half it staring at him across the table, trying to get that tiny curl of his lips to appear again, trying to remember to eat her sandwich and not just focus on every tiny movement he makes, but it feels halfway beyond her to do anything but that, to get her attention off of him and on anything else at all.

He’s as quiet as she is, his gaze occasionally catching and holding her own, but more often bent over his soup, as curved as his shoulders ever are in that way he has that he can sit entirely upright with what she’s sure is several inches left between his back and his chair and still give the impression that he’s leaning over his bowl, his head down and whatever conversation topic that might have passed between them otherwise left to another meal someday in favor of the silence hanging around them.  It’s nice, though.  Companionable, understood in its simplicity, a respite from the pace of her day and the constant chatter of classes and other students, a chance to sit in relative calm with him there across from her.

“I miss the old place,” she says when she’s done eating, balling up her napkin and leaving it on her plate as she watches him chase around the last of the noodles in his bowl.

“You did not enjoy your lunch?”

She toes at his ankle again, smiling when he glances from his bowl to the spot right next to where his napkin is resting on the table, where underneath it she’s nudging at the side of his foot.  “No, I did.  It’s just… I don’t know.”  

She leans her forearms on the edge of the table, leans forward slightly before looking up at him, trying to figure out if he knows what she means, since then maybe he can tell her, sure that she doesn’t exactly have the words she’s searching for.

That eyebrow of his rises and she nearly reaches across the table to smooth it back down.  “You are not certain that you enjoyed your food?”

“It was good,” she says, sitting back in her chair and not moving her foot from where it’s still resting against his.  She pushes her plate slightly farther away from herself as he sets his spoon down, his eyes tracing over her face.

She takes a deep breath and plays with her balled up napkin until she makes herself stop, feeling her nose wrinkle as she stares down at it.  

“We used to come here all the time,” she says and he nods and she nods and she shouldn’t have finished her water because she’d very much like a sip.  His is still half full and she might reach for it if she weren’t so busy twisting her hands together in her lap, sure that what she said was needless and unnecessary and really not actually accurate, not when they don’t have mugs of tea in front of them right now but their empty dishes.

His mouth quirks so slightly that maybe once she might not have noticed it.  Now, it’s hard to look anywhere else.  

“An exaggeration, to be sure,” he says and adjusts how his spoon is sitting next to his bowl.

“I’m not saying it was enjoyable,” she says, letting a smile gentle her words.   “Though it was.  Mostly in retrospect.”

“It was,” he says and she taps her boot against his again, trying to remember how it was, the thought of all of it colored now with all that has passed since then, making that same smile spread across her face once again in a way that she feels powerless to stop.

“You drove me nuts back then, you know.”

“I do.”

She lays her hands over the table in front of her, tipping her head to the side and studying him, her mouth twisting in a grin.  “You’re not going to do the honest thing and say ‘likewise’?”

“No.”

“You still drive me nuts,” she tells him.  

“You are still here,” he says again, a brightness in his eyes that she’s sure she’s never seen before and when he reaches for her plate, she hands it to him and thinks that it’s no accident how their hands touch again.

“So,” she says when they’re out on the sidewalk, the sun starting to angle downwards in the sky in a way that it never did in the height of summer, not at this time of day when the rest of her afternoon and all of her evening is still waiting for her.  

She watches his eyes flick over towards the Academy, the tops of a handful of buildings visible from where they’re standing and the gates back to campus just there, across the street and draws in a breath that fills her lungs before she blows it out again, feeling slightly empty in its wake.

“I have a meeting,” he says and she feels the calm of lunch begin to fracture.  He’s busy.  She is too, something she shouldn’t forget, and that she can’t, really, her eyes on his uniform and the insignia pinned to his chest and her bag weighing on her shoulder again, too heavy with everything crammed in there.

“Yeah, I have…” She waves up the street towards campus, trying to not picture how he’s about to walk away, when she spent all of last week looking forward to Friday, and then all of Saturday looking forward to that evening, and then could barely do her reading yesterday because she was too busy replaying their comm conversation and picturing lunch.  Now, he has his day to get back to and so does she.  “Those quizzes.  For you.”

“There is no rush.”

She pulls her bag up her shoulder and doesn’t let herself ignore everything that she wants to about her schedule, the semester facing her down, stretched out interminably before her.  “I don’t have another chance except for this afternoon.  I’m supposed to be getting ready for midterms and I have another paper and…”

She squints up the sidewalk before rocking back on her heels and looking up at him instead of at the Academy.  

“I’m glad we made time to do this,” she tells him, unwilling to walk away just yet.

“I am as well,” he says and it’s a moment before his eyes come away from a couple that has just come through the door, though she’s sure that he’s not really seeing them.  When he keeps standing there and she hasn’t moved either, she lets her hand find his elbow and tug him closer to her, lets herself tip her face up to his.

“I’ll see you soon,” she says, unsure of what else to say to him.  

She thinks he’s going to say goodbye, thinks that it might make her smile after all the times he didn’t do that, here on this stretch of street, but instead he bends down and kisses her once, quickly, softly, right there in the middle of the sidewalk in a way that leaves her slightly dazed, her mind a muddled, jumbled mess and a smile spreading over her face, one that his eyes trace over as he pulls back.

His office is as quiet as it ever is and she spends a moment gathering herself, letting her mind replay the moment his lips touched hers, the sight of him there on the sidewalk, their lunch, their conversation the night before, their weekend, and backwards as she takes a breath and then another and then leans against the back of her chair and rests her knuckles against her mouth, pressing her lips together and giving into the urge to think about nothing other than him.

The door whooshes open and she can’t help but look up from her desk, pulling in a sharp inhale, only to let it out again when it’s just Ho standing there, her hands full of filmplasts.

“Uhura, I’m glad I caught you,” Ho says and Nyota is sure that there’s some alternative to her life that’s probably happening in parallel to this moment, where Spock is there with her, about to work silently at his desk all afternoon, and she at hers, and Ho isn’t in his office instead of him.

Instead, Ho drops half of the filmplasts on his desk in a pile messy enough to make him straighten them if he were here.

“We missed you on Saturday,” Ho says, shuffling the stack in her hands.  “It was a good game,”

“Did we win?” Nyota asks, trying to remember who was playing and if there is a ‘we’ or if it wasn’t two other teams all together.

“In overtime,” Ho says.  She knocks the filmplasts she’s still holding against her palm and drums her fingers against them before leaning out the door to peer into the hall and then toggling the door to close.  “Two things for you, if you have a minute.”

Nyota’s hands tighten on the back of her chair, the quiet of Spock’s office nearly a perfect silence and Ho standing there staring at her.  “Absolutely.”

“Listen,” Ho starts, and pauses in a way that draws Nyota’s attention far more than parrises squares ever could, her hand too tight as she waits to hear what it will be that Ho says next, not exactly liking how the Commander’s eyes slide away from hers and then back again.  “The other night - last week, I’m sorry Engstrom brought that up about Hawkins, and what I said about Pike over using translators.  I thought about it later and- well,” she shrugs.  “Don’t repeat any of that that, please.”

“Oh, that’s-“ Not what she thought Ho would say, not that she’s sure what, then, she might have guessed it would have been.  “I won’t.”

“Didn’t think you would,” Ho says and gives her another small smile before she goes back to sorting through the filmplasts.  “And especially don’t bring up the fact that I really meant that about Pike.”

“Of course,” Nyota says as she begins to pull out her padd, placing it where she always does.

“And,” Ho says.  Nyota looks up, her fingers pressed to the edge of her padd.  “Not that I said that about Pike in the first place, but Commander Spock said you had some suggestions for our language tutorials?  You know the Commander was the one who programmed those, yes?”

“I do,” Nyota says carefully.

“I think I would have paid to see you tell him that.”

“Oh, I didn’t-“ Nyota starts, waving her hand slightly before replacing it on the back of the chair.  Know that he was the one.  Say it like how Ho must be imagining for the smile spreading over the other woman’s face.  “I, uh, waited until he was out by Neptune.”

“I knew you were smart,” Ho says and Nyota finds herself returning the other woman’s smile.  “And I know you’re busy, Uhura, I remember what it was like to be a cadet, but if you have time and you want to work on coming up with a better interface for all of our tutorials, we could see about getting you credit for it.  You and I could do it as an independent study next semester or over the summer.  I’d like to have a chance to work with you while you’re still at the Academy.”

“Thank you,” Nyota says and hopes that Ho can hear how much she means it, even as she feels a flush creep over her cheeks at what the Commander said.

“Think about it,” Ho says, straightening the filmplasts in her hands again as she takes a step away from Spock’s desk, only to pause and glance back at it.  “Neptune, huh?”

“It was-“ Nyota starts, watching how Ho’s eyes travel over the postcard that’s still sitting right there after all this time, the corner of the Commander’s mouth threatening to lift.  She’s not sure how that sentence ends so she stops talking, her hand still resting on the back of her chair and her attention trained on Ho as the other woman does smile before she heads towards the door.

“I hope you two had a nice weekend, Uhura,” Ho says as she opens the door again and heads out into the hall.  “And enjoy your afternoon.”

“You too, sir,” Nyota says though she’s not sure Ho can hear it, her boot falls already halfway back to her office.  

Nyota settles at her desk, all together too scattered and unfocused to start grading.  She has to still herself and just pause for a moment until she can get a grip on herself, only to realize she’s smiling down at her desk.  She leans back in her chair, grins up at the ceiling, and covers her face with her hands, giving into a long moment of enjoying the happiness that’s bubbling in her chest.  It’s a long time before she clears her throat and pulls the first quiz towards her, resolved to not think about independent projects and opportunities with department heads and a new semester ahead of her, no matter how much her mind keeps spinning in that direction, wheeling back around to everything that has happened.

Her determination to focus only lasts as long as the grading does and as she sets down the last padd, she feels the urge grow to email Ho to set up a time to meet and discuss further details or to begin to write down all her thoughts about how the tutorials should be designed so that she doesn’t forget anything.  Mostly, though, more than getting in touch with Ho and more than wanting to keep sitting there and smiling, she wants to wait around and see if Spock will come to his office so that she can remind him of that day so long ago when he first suggested working on them, when it was a far off idea that has now solidified into something so much more.

He doesn’t come, though, and he didn’t say he was going to so the half formed idea that he might slips away as the halls fill with students again and then empty and the shadows grow longer.

She stands up slowly, like lingering will make him appear the way he did earlier on the quad and then talks herself out of finding some excuse to keep waiting there, gathers her things, puts the quizzes on his desk to look at whenever it is that he’ll next be in his office, and pauses to neatly push her chair in.  They’ll see each other soon, like she said, and she can tell him when they’re together next, can watch his reaction to it and let it warm her straight through again, how pleased he’ll be and what he might say.

Campus is lit in streetlights and she’s not sure when, exactly, it started getting dark so early.  Or maybe it’s later than she realized.  She flips her comm open to check, then thinks that she should really be at dinner with her classmates, no matter that they’re likely finishing up their meals by now.  Instead, she scrolls through her contacts idly, and then with more purpose, and then presses Spock’s ID.

She stands in the middle of the path she’s on while it rings and then goes to his voicemail.  She hangs up before it prompts her to leave a message, flicking her comm shut and then opening it again, considering.  He’s likely in another meeting, for one of the many things he does, and if he saw that she called, he’ll call her back when he’s able to.

Illogical, she tells herself, to call again.

“How was your day?” Gaila asks when Nyota gets to their room, looking up from amid stacks of padds, a stylus stuck in the corner of her mouth and another one in her hair.

“You aren’t at dinner?” Nyota asks, somehow sure she would have been alone in their room, not have Gaila sitting there crosslegged on her bed.

“Obviously,” Gaila says, taking the stylus from her mouth.  “Is this a new thing?  Where we point out what’s going on around us?  I’m doing homework, that should be apparent, you won’t tell me about your sexscapades, also - and unfortunately - blatantly clear, just as blatant as the fact that I’m going to worm the information out of you as soon as I’m done diagramming this warp coil.  Which, I know, is not as special and perfect and amazing as the Enterprise’s warp coils, but some of us spent our Saturday nights trying - and failing - to talk Kirk and McCoy into a threeway instead of christening the flagship.”

“Who didn’t want to do it?” Nyota asks, flicking her comm open and then closed again.  Needless, really, to do that, but it doesn’t keep her from opening it again.

“Who never wants to do it,” Gaila sighs and Nyota flicks her comm closed once more when Gaila looks at it in her hand.  “I’m glad one of us had a good weekend.  I mean, I still got some, don’t get me wrong, but it just wasn’t the same, you know?”

“Having never approached either of them for anything of the sort, I am quite happy to say that I don’t know, and I’d frankly like to keep it like that.”

“You are happy,” Gaila says with a grumble, sorting through the padds next to her.  “I bet you guys did it like thirty times.  Thirty five, maybe, he’s in good shape.”

“Commander Ho wants to work with me,” Nyota says because she has to tell someone and her comm is still dark and silent.  Gaila smiles at that as Nyota sinks onto her bed and tries to tell herself that it’s just as good that Gaila’s excited even though it barely feels the same, hardly in any way edges towards the picture in her mind of what it will be like to tell Spock.  

“That’s wonderful.”

“I can get credits for it, too.  She said next semester, maybe.”

“Think she’ll even meet with you from 0430 to 0600 so that you can still take your normal course load?” Gaila asks, bending over her padd again and sticking her stylus back in her mouth.

She opens her comm again, checking the signal strength and then making herself look at the time.  She tries to get herself to consider how much homework she has and how long she has to do it in, what she might be able to get done tonight, but she mostly just sits there until the the screen of her comm dims slightly, and then continues to stare at it before it blinks off all together to save power.  She frowns, flipping it closed again.

“Nyota?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” she says, opening it again.

“You don’t think it’s at all funny to think about making a professor meet with you first thing in the morning?”

“It’s very funny,” she murmurs, telling herself not to call Spock again and then doing so anyway, ignoring the way Gaila shakes her head and mutters something to herself that Nyota doesn’t bother trying to understand.

She drops her comm on her desk when he doesn’t answer again, toeing off her boots and sorting through the padds in her bag and the ones on her desk before rubbing her hand over her face and making for the bathroom instead.

She doesn’t let herself shower for as long as she wants to, not with the pile of work waiting for her on her desk, though she doesn’t brush her hair with any type of efficiency, and only slowly pulls clothes from her dresser and draws them on, the shorts she brought over the weekend and a soft, old shirt.  She puts her hair up, then takes it down, and then ties it up again, not bothering with the care that she would use if she were on her way to class or out for the night, and then nearly takes it down again before making herself sit at her desk, ignoring how Gaila’s watching her.

“You got a message,” Gaila says and Nyota grabs for her comm, only to have Gaila point to her padd.  “A message, not a call from your wayward Commander.  How was lunch?”

“It was nice,” she says, hearing the smile in her own voice.

“The best that a lunch can be?” Gaila asks as Nyota sets her comm down again.  “The absolute preeminent, supreme, ultimate experience of a meal?  Are you two going to do it again post-haste?”

“Yes,” Nyota murmurs as she grabs for her padd before pausing, her hand resting on it.

“Immediately?” Gaila prompts when Nyota just keeps sitting there, her nails tapping once against the surface of her padd.  “Are you going to have lunch for dinner tonight?”

“I don’t know,” she says and then shakes her head.  “No, Gaila, that doesn’t make any sense.  And he’s- I think he’s probably in a meeting.  Or just busy, I guess.”

Probably finishing his own work somewhere other than his office, unless he’s there now and she left too soon to see him.  She pulls her padd into her lap and drums her fingers on it again, her mouth pressed into a tight line as she lets herself look at her comm, resting silent on the edge of her desk.  She’ll see him tomorrow, even if he doesn’t get back to her tonight, and they have all afternoon in his office together which will be full of work and other students coming by and officers chatting in the hall, but it will be something at least.  And they could eat together, afterwards, or get lunch before, and she can get her homework done quicker to make that a possibility and that will be something, at least, another small amount of time in the midst of their weeks carved out and set aside.  Not enough, maybe, but more than it might be otherwise.

Her padd buzzes in her hands, a second alert of the message waiting for her, and she flicks it on, trying to focus on something other than the memory of their lunch, and trying to remember what ID she might have set her inbox to send her an alert for.  Spock’s, over the summer, so that she didn’t miss any more messages from him after that first time, that seems so long ago now, and the regular alerts from the Academy, but Spock wouldn’t message her if he were in a meeting and if he wasn’t, he would have called by now, and Academy notices generally come in the morning.

“It’s probably a long list of other officers lining up to work with you,” Gaila says as Nyota opens it.  “I’m half expecting to walk into a Computer Sciences class one day only to have the professor start a presentation not on debugging sim codes but on the excellence that is Cadet Nyota Uhura.  Which - oh, wait, that’s right, that would actually happen once the Commander starts teaching more courses in the department.  I wonder if there’s a spring semester class I could take with him on it?  You could ask him, maybe, next time he takes you on a weekend adventure, right?  Nyota?  Nyota.”

“I…”  She turns her padd towards Gaila, who squints at it.

“You got a message, yes, and then stopped talking.  If I had known that was all it took, I would have sent you a message yesterday afternoon after the third time you told me about the detailing on the corridor outside of the secondary botany lab and how it was different than how the corridor outside of the primary botany lab looked, mostly in the way that the-“

“My paper.”  Her lips feel a little numb.  The padd is trembling when she turns it back to herself.  It must be her hands doing that, though she’s not sure how to make them stop.  “It got accepted.”

“Good,” Gaila says and picks up her stylus again, tucking a curl behind her ear as she starts to read.

“Good?”

“Didn’t you know that was going to happen?”

“No.”

“I thought that you said that the Commander said that it would definitely get published.”

“I need to talk to him,” she says.  The padd is still shaking so she sets it in her lap but then her comm is trembling the same way and she nearly dials Gaila instead as she scrolls through her most recent calls.

“Hi,” she says when she gets his voicemail again.  “I just found out-“ she starts, then stops, not quite willing to believe it yet, not when it’s too much to say it out loud to him, especially if he’s not there.  She’s sure that it would make it real if she can hear what he says when she tells him, would solidify what’s staring up at her from her padd, would etch it into fact, immutable and unchangeable and she really, really wants him to have answered his comm.  “Um.  If you get a chance, can you call me?  Tonight?”

She puts the padd on her desk and her comm on top of it, and then moves her comm so she can turn her padd on again, read the message, and then replaces everything and tucks her hands into her lap.  

“He’ll call.”

“Yeah,” Nyota says, pulling her hair elastic out, gathering her hair up again and retying it.  

“Hey,” Gaila says.  “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Nyota says, still staring at her comm.  She should have waited to open the message, should have brought it to work tomorrow, or asked to see him over breakfast, or maybe made herself wait all day until classes were over and asked if they could spend the evening together.  If he weren’t busy, he would have said yes, she’s nearly sure of it, and she could have gone to his place and they could have read it there, together, and if it were bad news, she would be done with work for the day and wouldn’t be distracted.  But it’s not bad news, it’s great news and she’s smiling, something she didn’t realize until right now because her cheeks are suddenly hurting, and if he would just call, then she could tell him what had happened.

“Come here,” Gaila says, setting her work aside and standing behind Nyota, wrapping her in a hard hug with her arms crossed over Nyota’s chest, a loud, smacking kiss placed on her temple.  “You’re a super genius.  Which we all knew, but now we have definitive proof.”

“Thank you,” Nyota says again, curling her hands around Gaila’s forearms.

“And Commander Ho gets to work with your enormous brain and you get to read and re-read your paper as soon as the journal comes out - don’t pretend you won’t - and I get the pleasure of having the most accomplished roommate anyone’s had ever in the history of everything.”  Gaila rests her chin on Nyota’s head and turns her padd on again, brushing her still dark comm aside.  “Look at that, right there, Nyota Uhura, published, prodigal, prodigy of the xenolinguistics department.”  Nyota closes her eyes as Gaila squeezes her.  “You got everything you wanted, didn’t you.”

“I did,” Nyota says except her comm is still stonily silent.

“As a present, I’ll let you tell me about the carpeting on deck five,” Gaila offers, letting go of her and flopping onto her own bed.  “And I won’t even ask if you two got any bodily fluids on it.”

“Thanks,” Nyota whispers, swallows.

“What do you think he’s doing?” she asks later, as she pulls the sheets back and reluctantly gets into bed, unable to concentrate on her work any longer, not that she’s entirely sure she did so in the first place, and not willing to keep the light on if Gaila wants to sleep, and sure that Gaila’s patience is at an end with how Nyota’s fidgeted all night, flicking her attention between her reading and her padd and her silent comm.

“Well, since he’s your favorite person - besides me - and your favorite thing to do - besides him - is work, I would say by the power of transitive properties and also logic, that he’s very likely working too.  Also probably freaking out a bit since he got a dozen missed calls from you and a very cryptic message.”

“I didn’t call him twelve times.”

“You want to, though,” Gaila says through a yawn.  “It’s a good thing he puts up with you, you know.”

She doesn’t bother to argue and doesn’t bother to hide the fact that she reaches for her comm before laying back against her pillows.  She tries to shield the screen from shining onto Gaila’s side of the room when she opens it, turning down the volume as tells herself not to touch Spock’s ID again, though she does anyway.

“Nyota,” he says before it’s barely had a chance to ring.  “I did not wish to wake you.”

“Hi,” she whispers, turning on her side, away from Gaila.

“Are you well?”

“Yes.”  She lays her cheek on her pillow and ignores the sounds of Gaila shifting.

“I was meeting with Captain Pike,” he says and she nods even though he can’t see it.  “I did not anticipate that it would take so long.”

“It’s ok,” she says, running her thumb over the side of her comm.

“I had thought to tell you tomorrow, though if you are available now-” he says, then pauses like he realizes that it should be a question.  “Are you?”

She nearly nods again for him to keep speaking just so she can listen to the sound of his voice, but he’s not there so she says, “I am,” and then adds, “I’m glad you answered.”

“It is pleasant to speak with you as well,” he says and in the pause that follows she tries to picture how his eyes look and what he might be doing with his hands, those tiny gestures of his that once she didn’t even know to notice and now are so telling.  “I asked him if it were possible - and if you are amenable - if you could return to the ship again at some point.  If you would like to.”

“Of course,” she says, sure that her stomach can’t possibly be fuller of the nearly sickening amount of joy that’s threatening to brim over into an even wider smile than she’s had since he picked up her call, but his words prove that there’s even more delight that she can feel, that it can just keep expanding and growing, no possible end to it in sight.

“It will not always be an option,” he says, sounding like he’s rushing to qualify himself, like he did when he invited her up there the other night, his words once again careful and slow like she could change her mind with any misstep.  “Though when you earn the rank of Lieutenant it will be less of an issue.”

“That’ll still take a while,” she says, not wanting to think of the qualifications, the practicums she’ll have to pass to be eligible, the other students in her class who are also aiming for that same rank and how few cadets the Academy promotes each year, wanting to only focus on the thought of another weekend up there with him, the quiet of his quarters and the sight of the stars.

“Not so long.”

“Hopefully.”  She rolls onto her back, ignoring the way Gaila kicks at her blankets.  “Are you- are you up there?  Now?”

“No,” he says and as soon as he does she hears something that sounds like traffic, maybe, a car passing him and the noises of a busy street.  

“At HQ?”

“I was.  I had thought to call you when I returned home, though the hour- Why did you call?” he asks, like he’s only just remembered.  The question makes a jolt of energy stab straight through her, makes her press her fingers to her stomach and makes her want to remember this moment, always, to hold it in her mind and not let it go.  

“I wanted to tell you-“ she starts, except that he’s not there, he’s outside on some street, standing on some sidewalk, and she’s in her room, in her dorm, and quite suddenly, before she can do much more than swallow, she knows absolutely and utterly that she can’t tell him now, not like this, not when he’s not there with her.  “Can I see you?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” he says.  “I am not far from your dormitory.”

“I’ll be right down,” she says.

“Finally,” Gaila mutters.

She stops on the top step just outside the doors, suddenly, abruptly aware that she’s in shorts and it’s not warm out, and that the jacket she grabbed in no way matches, and that her hair that she hastily tied up again is a mess after an evening of running her hands through it, but there’s really no time to even begin to think about it because Spock is there and she pulls her jacket closer around herself, her arms tight around her stomach at the sight of him, then raises one hand in greeting, running it back over her hair after waving to him.

Spock stops too, then keeps walking towards her.  “You look-”

She laughs, her arms crossed over her stomach again, that hot joy bursting in her, heady and sweet.  “Stop.”

He comes to stand on the step below her, his fingers tugging at the hem of her jacket.  “You are cold.”

“Is that what you were going to say?”

“Yes,” he says.

She squints at him, smiles, edges closer to the lip of the step.  “Truly?”

“In part.”

“Ho wants to do an independent study with me,” she says, unable to keep the words in another moment, not with him standing there, the lights from her dorm playing over his face.  As soon as she starts speaking, she finds she can’t stop, everything rushing up and out of her, breaking through the effort of holding it back, a dam releasing in a stream of all that she’s been waiting to tell him.  “She told me today, for the tutorials?  She said maybe next semester.  And- and I got home, tonight, and my paper got accepted-“  She has to take a breath to keep going, sure that it will help with that lightheaded feeling but she still feels like she’ll float away, like her feet can’t possibly still be on the ground, not with how his eyes widen and how she can feel his grip on her jacket tighten.  “-For the next volume, this fall.  They only asked for minor edits and the lead reviewer, she said it was one of the best submissions-“ She has to breathe again, and to smile except that she’s never really stopped, not for what seems like ages now. “-They liked the analysis about Desai.  Of course.”

He tugs at her jacket to move her closer to him.  “Nyota, that is excellent.”

“I wanted to tell you that.”

His eyes are dark and he pulls lightly at her jacket again.  “I am pleased that you did.”

He looks a lot more than pleased and she presses her tongue into the corner of her lips, feels a shaky exhale leave her in what might be something like a laugh, the air rushing out of her since she can’t even begin to hold it back.

“Any other pertinent information?” he asks, still fingering the hem of her jacket so that she can feel each tweak of the fabric every time his fingers move.  It nearly makes her lean into him, though she also wants to just keep staring at him and with him watching her too, she’s not sure she can look away just then, no matter how she wants to fold herself against his chest.

“No,” she says and then takes a deep breath and corrects herself because she thought saying all of that out loud would ease how tight her throat has grown, but it didn’t.  “Yes.”

“Are you intending to share it?”

She drags her toe against the top step, has to press her lips together and spend a moment just trying to pull a breath past that ache in her throat.

“Thank you for coming over.”

“Of course.”

“And for your help on my paper.”

“Nyota, that was-“  He shakes his head, his voice warm and rich and deep, so low that she lets it flow through her.  “That was one of the more enjoyable experiences I have had.  The most, perhaps.”

She nods and inhales sharply, rocking back on her heels and then towards him slightly on her toes, staring down at his hand on her coat.

There’s a pang down deep in her chest, a tenderness as she looks at him that squeezes her heart, pushes words up and out of her.

“I want to spend more time with you.  How we used to, over the summer.”  She feels how true it is as the words tumble out, clearer and steadier than she ever would have imagined.  “I miss it and it’s even better now and I don’t think I ever wanted to stop,” she tells him and has to swallow and stare at him standing there in front of her taking up every bit of her focus, everything she never knew she needed until he was there.  Is there.  Now.  With her, staring right back.

She’s suddenly nearly nauseous, her head swimming and her throat closed up and her chest hot, entirely filled with heat in a way that aches and clenches and makes her pull her arms across her stomach, tight, which thankfully doesn’t dislodge his hand from where he’s still holding her coat.

His eyes are so wide as his head tips slightly, his body a hand's breath from hers and his mouth slightly parted, before he nods. “Likewise.”

She unwraps her arms from herself, her hands shaking at her sides.  When he takes her hand in his, she thinks his are shaking, too, or maybe hers are trembling hard enough for the both of them.  She looks down at them hanging between them, how small her fingers look against his, how she sees his thumb move over the back of her hand in the moment before she feels it and is sure that she’s no longer certain what it was like before she knew how that tingle of his skin on hers feels.  

She’s still staring at his touch on her, still feeling it warm her from within when she says, “I know we weren’t really together then, but I want to be.”

She’s sure that she can feel seconds slip past them, sure that she can see on his face as he processes what she said.  The longer she watches him the warmer her face grows and the tighter her throat gets and the more she wants to step into him, slip inside of him and find that place that makes her feel so safe when she’s around him, impossibly more like herself whenever he’s near, calmer and centered in a way that once she would have never thought possible.

She draws in a breath that shivers every inch of the way into her lungs, whispers, “Everything is always better with you.”  It’s easy enough to tell him, true and honest and she knows it’s exactly what she means the moment she hears the words spoken between them.

It’s strange, really, how her heart is still beating so fast, over something that in the end is so simple.  She rocks back on her heels, stares up and the sky and then back at him, letting out a breath and unable to get her voice back above a whisper. “I should have said all of that a long time ago.”

His mouth is still open like he’s about to speak again even though nothing comes out and she doesn’t wait for him to fill the silence between them, instead stepping closer and feeling something drain out of her, or maybe fill her the rest of the way up, her entire body too tight and too hot like she could crawl right out of herself with everything in her, like she could just pour it all into him since there’s not enough of her to contain everything she feels.   

“I love you,” she adds and feels everything slow even further, watches as he hears her and then freezes, sees the moment he takes in her words, suddenly his hand on her jacket tightening, his hand in hers stilling, his entire body caught immobile and completely and utterly still, before his chin lifts and he’s looking up and over her head.  

“Spock?” she asks craning to see him, sure that time won’t start again until she does, that they’ll just hang motionless in this moment, strung out in the middle of breaths and seconds until, in the place between one heartbeat and the next, she gets a look at his expression.  “Are you- are you smiling?”

“No,” he says, then wraps one big, warm hand around the back of her head and kisses her, hard.

She can barely breathe when they break apart, her lungs burning for air or maybe it’s how tight he’s holding her, his other arm snaked around her waist and his grip on her pressing her against his body as he kisses her again, leans her back against his arm and the hand that’s still holding the back of her head.

“I had intended,” he says when he pulls back, his hands on her cheeks and her hold on his sides keeping him there against her.  He thumbs at her jaw and tucks loose strands of her hair back behind her ears, his hands smoothing over her hair before his fingers sink into it and he leans in to kiss her again like he can’t help himself.  “Upon the acceptance of your paper, I had thought to ask you to join me for dinner.”

“You’re going to take me out?” she asks and thinks she can barely believe it, not any of it, not any single thing that has happened to her, all of it entirely too much to even begin to understand.

“I would like to.”

“Ok,” she says and closes her eyes when he presses his forehead to hers.  It’s still hard to breathe but that’s mostly because her chest is so incredibly tight, everything in her full to brimming, spilling over and out of her in a laugh and smile and a tear that he reaches up to wipe away with his thumb.  “It’s a date.”


	40. Chapter 40

He takes her down towards the water, the bridge lighting up the sky ahead of them.

“Where are we going?” she finally asks as the bay draws near, the Academy left blocks behind, a stream of students heading to the gym and the mess hall and the library for the night that they had walked away from.

“Perseverance is the hallmark of a successful Starfleet cadet.”

“Funny.”

“As is a sense of adventure.”  

“Very funny.”

“I have something to show you, though I suppose it would be prudent to feed you first.”

“You’re going to make me wonder all through dinner?”

“Indeed,” he says, touching her elbow lightly, as if to continue to draw her down the sidewalk with him, though all the feel of his fingers does is make her want him to kiss her again, like he did when he met her at the steps of her dorm, so fast and quick that it was hardly even close to enough.

They have all night, though, and walking beside him, their arms brushing together, the soft breeze not too cold, and the view of the bay spreading out in front of them, she thinks she’s fine with a little anticipation.  It’s better, anyway, than trying to sit in class, staring at her notes like she was possibly concentrating on them and not already imagining this moment, the sound of his footsteps falling in tandem with hers down the sidewalk, and the ability to reach over and take his hand.  She can, now, because she’s not in a lecture hall and she’s not waiting for lunch to end and she’s not sitting through her afternoon study group and instead he’s next to her and the hours until life restarts - all that they left behind when they walked out of campus and started down the street, uniforms and padds and the aching rigidity of everything that is the Academy - seems far off, too dim and distant to really consider, not when his fingers curl around hers and she can feel that hot, heady joy pass between their skin.

It was the same when they sat out front of her dorm as the night slipped by them, their sides pressed together from their knees to their hips to their waists, their hands linked in his lap and her hand holding on to the crook of his elbow.  She only knows how long they sat there in how tired she was in the morning, words swimming in front of her eyes that burned with the itch of too little sleep and which she couldn’t focus on because the pull of wanting to continue to remember how his shoulder felt under her cheek and how once he turned to press a kiss to the top of her head was too much, too strong to do anything but give into it.

Now, she feels similarly swept away, the world around them dreamlike, each block passing by them and registering as no more than a backdrop to the fact of him so close to her.  It comes as a surprise then, a shock that she has to look around herself and pull her attention away from the slow movement of his thumb over hers, when he stops beside a restaurant, one of many that line the edge of the water.

“Here?” she asks and feels that sparking fizz of excitement, of nerves and too much energy that she’s carried with her for hours now, since leaving class and going back to her dorm to change, or maybe before that, waking up in the morning with the thought of the evening so close at hand.

“If it is acceptable to you,” he says and there’s a note in his voice that makes her think she’s not the only one feeling a pricking thrill of agitation, all of this nearly too much to even begin to grasp.

“Nice choice,” she tells him as the warm press of his hand on her back urges her through the door.  “How’d you find it, run a non-parametric correlation analysis?”

“That was hardly necessary.  Multiple regression was sufficient,” he says and she’s about to ask what variables he included when she takes a look around and decides that she doesn’t care how he came to pick this restaurant, what exactly went into the process and and what made him select this one out of the others he could have taken her to, because it’s beautiful and warm and cheery and the sight of it is making her smile, making her walk further in and bite at the inside of her cheek.

“Two,” he tells the host and she has to smile at that, too, maybe has to smile at all of it, everything, the fact that there’s an actual candle on the table, and the paper of the menu, so rare that she wants to just touch it, and at the tablecloth and the napkins and the view of the bay out the window next to their table, how the setting sun is lighting up the sky.  

“Do you require assistance with your chair?”

“What?” she asks and he pulls it out before she can make sense of his question.

“My first semester at the Academy,” he says as he pushes her chair back in for her which is enough that she has to run her hands over her hair, smoothing it over her shoulders and try to not let her hands flutter against the edge of the table, though they do anyways.  “Puri took it upon himself to view nearly the entirety of available films depicting Terran courtships.”

“What did you do?” she asks, trying to not stare at him as the light from the candle between them flickers over his face.  She has a moment to just take him in as he arranges his napkin on his lap, a moment to try to take a deep breath and keep herself from smiling even wider, or just laughing out loud at this, at all of this, at every moment that has happened since they met outside her dorm and long before then, too.  “Take notes?”

“Indeed.  You also completed the requisite Interstellar Navigation course during your first semester here.  It is tremendously time consuming, as I believe you recall, and I was forced to be quite diligent during the lectures and while doing the reading in recording pertinent information.”  He picks his menu up and then puts it back down again.  “Though being unable to completely ignore the holovids - due mostly to the decibel at which Puri watched them - I became aware of the difficulties human females faced with managing their chairs by themselves.  It was confusing to be sure, as my mother seemed quite capable of doing so, and you have shown no sign of being in need of aid, nor has anyone else of my acquaintance.”

“I never said that any of this makes sense,” she says, though she’s not about to blow out that candle for the sake of simplicity, nor suggest that they go somewhere else, not if he chose this for them, walked down here with her, and had this in mind the entirety of the time she was fidgeting in class.

He sits back in his chair when the waiter comes to fill up their water glasses and she’s not sure she realized how far forward he was leaning across the table, not when he always seems to sit so upright, his shoulders so straight, normally filling out his uniform and now in the sweater he must have changed into after work.  

“I mean to say,” he starts and then pauses, one eyebrow drawing down slightly and his mouth opening, but no words come, not then and not when he gives the slightest shake of his head.

“I can handle chairs,” she tells him.

“I presumed as much.”

“And doors,” she adds.

“The majority of contemporary models are pneumatic.”

“I know.”  

He takes a sip from his glass before replacing it where it was and wiping his fingers off on his napkin, his brows drawn together as he says, “With the exception of your instruction and explanation and the availability of observable behaviors of others, combined with pertinent evidence from which to form assumptions, which are at best speculation and not-“

“Spock,” she says.

“I am unfamiliar with this,” he says and she could ask him to clarify, could ask him to spell out what he means and draw the specifics out of him, but the hand that he has spread on the table and the way that he pulls it abruptly back into his lap when he sees her notice it says everything she doesn’t need him to.

“I haven’t done this either.  Recently.”  She takes a sip of her water too since he had a good idea with doing that.  She’s not sure that a handful of dates with anyone else really counts, that anything that happened in college or before is at all comparable, that anyone in her life has ever stacked up to him, sitting there across from her, his focus trained on the window even though she’s sure he’s not seeing the bay or the bridge.  The candlelight flickers over his cheeks, highlighting his hair with a golden shine and deepening the shadows at the corner of his eyes when they tighten slightly before she reaches across the table and spreads her fingers next to his fork and tells him, “Ever, really.  We’re in the same boat.”

She waits for him to tell her that her statement is entirely illogical, or nonsensical, or that he would recommend that humans continue to refine their language so that it is not as senseless as tends to be the case more often than not, but he nods down at his bread plate, his lips pressing together until he seems to realize that he’s done so and his expression smooths out again, blanking but nothing about it easing.

“Well,” she adds, keeping her hand there until he pulls his from his lap and lays his fingers over hers.  She feels her stomach pitch at the touch, all that keyed up, skittish energy she’s had all day, all the hours that she’s waited to be here with him like this seeming to arc between them where their skin comes together.  “It’s maybe a good thing that we had a chance to work the hiccups out.”  She smooths her hand up the back of his to finger his cuff.  “Nice sweater.”

There’s a trace of softening in the lines around his mouth and his shoulders fall on his exhale.  

“Nyota, this is not my strength.  If we are to- I am certain I do not know the ways in which…”  He shakes his head again, firm and quick this time.  “You are important to me,” he says so simply, so plainly and so quickly that she feels the words settle down deep inside of her.

She tries to clear her throat and work out the knot that has settled there, the one that makes her swallow, hard, and join him in staring blindly at the world beyond the window.  She can’t dislodge it, though, not when she replays his words over and over to herself, not when he very gently and very slowly takes her fingers in his.

The breath she tries for gets stuck in that same spot and she nearly raises her hand to rub at her neck, but instead just squeezes his fingers, probably too hard.

“You are too,” she says and when she gets herself to shift her focus from the window swimming before her to the way he’s watching her, his eyes all together too soft, he nods and she swears she can feel it over every inch that their skin touches, a calm that spreads out from her fingers and nestles down in her chest.

“You studied multilevel modeling as an undergraduate,” he says when she feels like she’s started to gather herself back together again, when she’s picked up her menu and is trying to focus on it and trying to still the buzzing, dizzying mess of her thoughts that he seems to cause in her, his presence across the table enough to leave her scattered and his words that are still echoing through her doing the rest of the job.

“What?” she asks, sure that he’s left her with absolutely no ability to recall something like that, sure that he has to know that he’s left her absentminded and feeling far away from her body like she’s nearly somewhere and somehow outside of herself.

“I never inquired,” he says.  “And I am curious as to your thoughts on the subject.”

“You are?”

“Yes,” he says and that eyebrow of his quirks again and she should maybe be over it by now, that hot flush that spreads across her face with how he’s looking at her, all that amusement of his hidden behind his expression, but her surety that somewhere, somehow she’ll stop being affected like this by him is not enough to keep her from wanting to run her hands through her hair again.  “Is that not the point of this?” he asks and with barely moving, manages to gesture to the table and the restaurant and them sitting there together, across from one another.  “I was informed that dinner was an opportunity to, I believe your words were, get to know each other.”

She presses the back of her hand to her mouth, smiling at the window and then down at her menu and then at him.

“Is it,” she says lightly, bending over her menu again and not seeing a word printed on it. “Are you really going to ask me about a degree that you’ve already searched through my file for information about instead of detailing the oh, dozen or so things you have so far refused to tell me about your life?”

“I do not know to what you are referring.”

“Nuts,” she says, drawing the word out, hearing the affection lace her voice and watching how his mouth twitches.

“As you have by now demonstrated a proclivity for such, I believe that it is incumbent upon me to remind you that you are fully aware that circumstances such as these would continue to arise as a result of the enduring nature of our association.”

“Is that Vulcan for, you knew what you were getting into, and now you have to live with it?”

“In a manner,” he says and picks up his menu again.  “Though I will make mention of the fact that I was speaking Standard.”

Their hands find each others again and she rubs her thumb over his palm as she tries to decide if caring what she’s going to order is more important than taking a moment to watch him read his menu.

“Hey,” she says softly and she wonders if she’ll ever be over that, how his eyes so quickly refocus on her whenever his attention shifts away from what he’s reading or doing to settle on her instead.  “Back in the beginning of the summer?  When I got mad at you?”

“Which instance?”

She squeezes his fingers.  “I’m still sorry.  If I could do all that over again, I would have never… I would have done a lot of things differently.“

She lets out a soft laugh, not one of much humor at all, not as she shakes her head and holds his hand and holds her menu and only leans away from him when the waiter comes for their order.

“Orzo?  Really?” she asks as the waiter walks away again, at the same moment that he says, “I would have as well.”

She’s quiet for a moment, smoothing her napkin over her lap and reaching for a piece of bread from the basket set on the table, pulling it apart so that steam curls up from it, and then putting it on her bread plate and leaving it there without eating it.

“It worked out,” she finally says and he nods and she has to smile again, has to cross her legs under the table and lean forward in her chair because he’s too far away, that arm’s length from her.

“Against all odds,” he says and she’s sure that he’s probably calculated it.  He did, once, laying next to her and she thinks she’d be happy to crawl back into that moment, to do it all over again with him, to end up in this same place all this time later.

“I didn't know this was possible,” she says quietly, his eyes trained on hers  She could look at her bread again but doesn’t, keeps her attention trained back on him.  “That we could do that and would end up here.  That it was even a… That when we started, this was even an option.”  

It still seems nearly unimaginable.  Inconceivable, something that she absolutely can’t even begin to grasp, that all that happened and that they’re here now, staring at each other across a table with words she didn’t ever know either of them would say to each other out there in the open, spoken and heard and engraved into her memory, etched there like he is in her life, carved in deep, rooted and ingrained into her so that she’s not sure she’s entirely sure of who she is anymore without him there with her.

“Likewise."

She has to clear her throat because words keep getting stuck there, and she has to work her tongue over her bottom lip to make sure that when she speaks that they’ll come out, and she has to keep staring at him, entirely unable to look anywhere else.

“The summer was - it was crazy that we did that,” she says.

“Quite.”

“And fun,” she says, just to see if she can get him to agree to that, too, though he doesn’t, just gives her that twitch of his eyebrow that never fails to make her smile.  “That was a nice weekend in Mojave.”

“Due, I presume, to another aspect of the experience than the accessibility of the coffee.”

She huffs out another quiet laugh, shaking her head slowly at the thought of that morning, reaching for his hand again and holding it until their food comes, her eyes on him the entire time, either unwilling or unable to look away and she doesn’t try to, so she doesn’t find out which it is, just watches the candlelight on his face and the glow of the setting sun.

After dinner, they continue down to the water until they reach the end of the sidewalk, where the pavement stops at a small courtyard rimmed by a railing, the bay lapping against the stones beneath it.

“There,” he says.  She follows where he’s pointing, steps closer to him to do so because when she does, his hands rise to her shoulders and he holds her there in front of him, warm and solid at her back.

“Richmond?” she asks, trying to remember what’s across the water and trying to see what it is that she’s supposed to be looking at when she’d rather step back into him and have his hands tighten on her.

“There is a road that runs beneath that bridge, along the water.”

“Ok?”

“You were so curious,” he says.  “For so long now.  I felt it necessary that I share.”

“Share?” she echoes.  It takes her longer than it should, but he’s still touching her so she forgives herself for being distracted, for wanting to feel the press of his hands on her instead of sussing out why he walked her down to the bay and has her staring across it.  When she understands, a laugh rises out of her and she still doesn’t know how he does it, pulls that surprised laughter out of her as often as he seems to, leaving her delighted despite herself.  She presses her fingers to her mouth, shakes her head, her hair tumbling loose around her shoulders with the motion and the breeze coming off the water catches and pulls at her clothes.  “Really?”

“I,” he says, his hands still holding her shoulders.  “Was not driving.”

“But you were in the car.”

“I was in a meeting.  An offsite training seminar for newly commissioned officers who had received their first deployments,” he corrects in that overly precise way of his.  She remembers it driving her crazy, remembers that irritation with it and with him but it doesn’t seem to make any sense to her anymore, that itch rising up in her so distant now to have never have been there at all, a dim echo of a memory that may have belonged to someone else entirely.  “Puri and I both were when he remembered that he had told Arlene he would pick her parents up from the transport station.”

“And?” she prompts, her tongue pressed to the corner of her mouth.

“And I had driven us both there.”

“And?” she asks again, letting herself lean back into him.

“I am certain you can infer what happened, though I will make specific mention of the fact that despite the delay of being ticketed, we did arrive at the transport station on time.”

“How fast did he drive?”

“I believe the incident report is public domain.”  He tugs her further into him, his thumbs working across her jacket, back and forth over her shoulders.  “I would ask you to not mention the incident to Arlene.”

“I won’t.”  

She covers one of his hands with her own, keeping it there with his fingertips pressed warm to her collarbone.  When she touches his first two fingers with hers, she feels his nose brush against the top of her head, the whisper of his breath in her hair and what might be a kiss, a small, soft one that makes her want to close her eyes and just drift in the moment and on the memory of her first ever inkling of what might have happened, so long ago now that began to lead them to here and now.

“Thanks,” she says as she slips away from him to turn from the bay to face him instead, reaching behind her to grab on to the railing.  “That was… I’m glad you told me.”

She has to speak around her smile to say it, has to nearly laugh again at the thought of it, of all of this, of him standing there as the shadows around them lengthen and the clouds light up, edged in gold as the sun continues to slip away.

He takes a step towards her and gathers back the hair that is blowing around her face, holding it loosely at the base of her neck, his forearms resting on her shoulders.  She can’t help but tip her head back, dragging her teeth over her bottom lip as he spends a moment looking down at her.  She’s unable to prevent the smile still tugging at her mouth and unable to do anything but watch the way he’s looking at her, to try to take it all in, his eyes clear and brown and gentle, something in them softer than she often sees, a warmth coming through that, the longer he watches her, begins to spread hot and thick through her chest.

“Nyota,” he says and then stops, his mouth working over words that don’t come.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she tells him, raising her hand so that she can touch her knuckle to his cheek, so that she can give a firm tug to the front of his jacket and then hold on to it, her grip keeping him right there against her as his fingers keep tangling through her hair.  “When I told you-“  It’s too much, still entirely, overwhelmingly, completely and utterly too, too much and she’s surprised she can say it at all, can put voice to the words that tumble through her, can find a language to even begin to express the cartwheeling delight that has found a home in her stomach and seems certain to stay there.  For how long, she can only imagine, and for how long it’s been there to begin with she has no idea, sure only that it’s expanded to the point that there’s no possible containing it.  “I love you.  So much.”  It’s easier today than it was, the words flowing more freely, loosened in a way they never were before.  It’ll get easier still, she’s sure, something to look forward to along with the rest of all of it, so much waiting for them that she’s not entirely sure she can bear it.  “You don’t have to say that back.”

He does, though.  He pulls his hands from her hair, smooths it down her back and when that crease forms between his brows, she rubs her thumb over it and cups his cheek as he says, “I have loved you for some time now.”

Their kiss is soft and slow, but not slow enough for her, not when she wants to unwind time and hold it still, so that the minutes won’t restart but instead will continue to stretch around them, unmoving and drawn out long and full, lingering like his mouth does near hers, their lips brushing together before they kiss once again.

When they part, his palms are still pressed to her back, spreading warmth across her skin in a way she never wants to stop.  

“For how long?” she can’t help but ask, her thumb pressed to his lips. 

“I hardly know.”  He lets out a breath that tickles over her skin and he gives the slightest shake of his head.

Her hand drifts down his jaw to his neck, his shoulder, quite unable to stop touching him now that she’s started, now that she can as much as she wants.  She curls her fingers into the collar of his sweater, his skin hot and soft where the backs of her fingers brush and stares at her hand there, at the rapid flutter of his pulse that she can feel, the tic in his neck where it beats through his skin.  She wonders if there’s anyone else around them, wonders if she looked if she would even notice if there were, if she has any room left in her for anything that isn’t him.  

“Are we really going to do this?” she asks, knowing his answer but wanting to hear it again, and then probably again after that, and then again and again until it’s branded down deep so that it’s certain and absolute, ingrained so fully into herself and between them that it’s never bound to change.

“I have every intention of doing so.  If you do.  Which I believe is accurate,” he says and it doesn’t sound like a question but like he’s saying something for her, something that makes her wipe the back of her hand under her nose and frown and swallow and blink tight against how hot her eyes have grown.

“And we’ll figure this out?”

His thumb brushes beneath her eye, spreading warmth across her cheek and when she lets out a breathy laugh he touches the side of her mouth.  “We did once before.”  

“I barely know where to begin,” she admits and his hand on her back tightens, holds her steady and warm and solid.

“Someone once offered me sage advice,” he says, and there’s that spark in his eyes again, that warmth and softness that seems to settle into his expression when he looks at her, the one that echoes the place in her chest that he’s long ago set up residence.  “That we share a cup of tea and then go from there.”

“Sounds pretty smart.”

“She is,” he whispers and she closes her eyes when his lips brush her forehead.

“Then here’s the part where you invite me back to your place,” she says and he smiles too, his eyes flicking up and away like that could possibly hide the shine in them.

“It is a logical destination for such.”

“Since our cafe is gone,” she says.

“Precisely.”

“Can I have my postcard?” she asks, drawing back enough to better look up at him again.

“As it is still in my possession, I am not sure how it can qualify as yours,” he says and the way he shakes his head makes her bite at her lip again, grin up at him.

“You gave it to me.”

“Only to have you immediately return it.  A peculiar gesture, to say the least.”

She leans back in his arms, wanting to both tuck herself into him, push as close as she can to where his heart beats and also just stare up at him so that she can sear this moment into her memory forever, hold it near to her always.

“We’re going to do this all over again?”

His hold on her tightens and she lets herself be drawn forward into him.  “I believe that we already are.”

“Well then,” she whispers.  She closes her eyes and when she opens them again, she curls her hand into his and tugs him with her up the street.  “Let’s get started.”


	41. Epilogue

_Several weeks later_

...

“Hey you,” she says from her desk, her hand paused on her padd at the sound of his footsteps, the tap of them down the otherwise quiet hallway and how they halt at the door to his office.  “They already came to get most of your things, if you’re looking for them.”

“I was looking for you,” Spock says from just inside the door and she turns to look at him standing there, the sight of him making her heart pick up that patter she’s grown more used to than not these days.

It makes her smile and she directs it down at the filmplasts in front of her, trying to be glad that he wasn’t in his office all afternoon, giving her a chance to finish grading without him being so close to her.  “I’m nearly done.”

“There is no rush,” he says as he begins to sort through the few items remaining on his desk, the padd he was using for the end of semester faculty meeting earlier in the day, and one or two books that he wanted to bring back to his apartment rather than have transferred to his new office in Computer Sciences.

“You uploaded the grades?” he asks as she adds the stack of filmplasts to the corner of his desk, then straightens them before he can reach to do it.

“I did,” she says, tapping them into an even neater stack.  “Anything else?”

“No.”

“So is that it?” she asks, looking over his bare desk, the bookshelf that used to have his padds on it, the room that seems so empty after all this time.  It makes her sad, just like she knew it would, a little hollowed out and a lot hesitant to leave and she gives into the urge to linger there for another moment with him beside her, similarly unmoving except to look down at her.  She returns his gaze with a soft smile.  Next semester, someone else will be in here.  Likely Irani, if the way she’s been after Ho has been any indication, Spock’s tales of the inner workings of office assignments leaving with Nyota willing to put money on the Lieutenant moving in before break is over.  For now, though, it’s still Spock’s, and for a couple minutes more it’s still theirs, still the first room she was ever alone with him in, where she sat just there in the chair that’s in front of his desk, half sure she was crazy and half ready to blame the entire thing on Gaila.

She still blames Gaila, but Spock there next to her suitably makes up for it, even more so when she knocks her shoulder into his arm.

“We should get going,” she says even though she’s not sure that she really wants to, not when she could spend just one more moment here with him like this.  It’s the thought of telling Gaila that she dragged out her last afternoon of work that makes her shoulder her bag.  And she will tell her, she thinks, send her a message that Gaila will read with a fruity drink in one hand who knows what in the other, her list for what she was going to do on Risa so long that Nyota had to give up keeping track of it.

“We should,” he echoes and it might be an accident the way the back of his fingers brush against the back of hers, but it isn’t, and it makes her smile all the way to the turbolift.  

“You are finished with your semester,” he says as the doors shut behind them, closing out the sight of the empty hallway.  Everyone else is gone already, off on their vacations or celebrating the end of the term, leaving the building echoing with quiet.  

“I am,” she says as the lift starts.  It hasn’t really sunk in yet that finals are done and she’s half sure that she’ll remember something else that she needs to do, but finishing the grading for Advanced Morphology was the last item on her list and free time, no matter how odd it feels, is stretching out before her, unscheduled and unhurried.  “It’s too bad.”

“You are nostalgic for your coursework already?” he asks and she can’t help but think that he and Gaila have been spending entirely too much time together recently.

“No, I just had this really cute boss.”

“Oh?”

“Huge crush on him,” she says airily as the floors tick by.  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“If you would like to describe the qualities you found most estimable, I assure you I would be amenable to listening.”

“Too many to count,” she says, and stands on her toes and presses a kiss to his cheek because it’s vacation and she can and even though they’re still on campus and she really shouldn’t be doing that, she’s still a little sad that no matter how much she’s looked forward to the end of the term, they won’t be going back to that office together again.  “I won’t get through them all before dinner.”

It’s cold outside, a hard, bitter crispness carried on the breeze that seems too chilly for the city and makes her pull her jacket tighter around herself and tuck her hands under her arms as they walk.  The wind makes his nose a little green which makes her smile and makes her turn to him so that she can keep looking at it, which makes it easier to just take his hand in hers rather than continue to walk with her arms crossed around herself like that, his fingers cold when she tangles hers through them.  

“I presume that is everything?” he asks when they are both unzipping their coats in his apartment and he’s hanging up her bag.

She follows him to the kitchen, sorting through the groceries he left out for her, rubbing her hands together and trying to let the heat of his quarters seep into her and warm the chill the wind left her with.  It’s easier, really, to stand just behind him and tuck her hands into him, so she does, smiling where she’s leaned against his back when he twitches as her fingers find his sides.  “Did you get-“

“These?” he asks, picking up two packages and moving them to the front of the counter, in front of the spices he picked up and the ginger root that she had to describe to him twice before he could locate it, whispering in the stairwell of the library only yesterday as she spoke to him while finishing her last paper.  It seems longer than just a few hours ago, the semester already sliding away behind her as she examines the plantains he got, half wanting to open the jar of coriander just to smell it.  “Flours? Of course.  I understand they are traditional among Terrans.”

She snorts out a laugh before she can stop herself, pressing a dry kiss to his shoulder blade, the fabric of his uniform soft when she rests her cheek against it.

“Thank you,” she says as seriously as she can without laughing again.

He pours her a glass of wine while she gets started, leaving it next to her and watching over her shoulder as she peels the plantains and begins to slice them, probably not as neat and even as he could do it, but it leaves them looking like how they did on her grandmother’s cutting board, the wood of her counters old and worn, so different than the pristine shine of Spock’s kitchen.

“Make yourself useful,” she instructs when he keeps hovering there beside her and hands him the ginger and a grater.  “Two teaspoons, please.”

He goes back to watching when she kneads the chapati dough on his table, close enough that her elbow bumps against his stomach.  She’s sure that he’s never seen even a speck of dust on the surface, let alone a light coating of flour and she would ask him to start chopping the onions or garlic, but finals were long and she didn’t see him as much as she would have liked to and she decides that she rather likes having him there next to her.

“Are you going to be ok?” she asks as she sprinkles more flour onto the table.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“The chemical reaction is quite fascinating,” he says, his eyes on her hands as the dough grows less lumpy and more elastic, a slight shine beginning to show when she folds it back into itself again.

“Is that what you were looking at,” she says mildly.

He’s still examining the dough when she leaves it on the table to rest, washing her hands off and peering back of her shoulder at him, stopping for a moment with her hands still held over the sink as he bends closer to it, the jacket he’s still wearing pulling against his back.  

She checks the pot bubbling on the stove, adjusts the heat, and recovers it before going over to her bag and pulling out a filmplast.  He straightens when she brings it over to him and leans into her when she wraps her arm around his waist.

“What is this?” he asks as she holds it out in front of him until he takes it, his attention split between it and the fine dusting of flour that she left on the black of his uniform, that she brushes at lightly and mostly ineffectually.

“Sorry,” she says, wiping her hand over his flat stomach again, the fabric of his uniform warm like it always is whenever she touches him.

“You do not sound it.”

“I’m not.  That’s my class schedule for next semester,” she tells him.  It’s starting to smell like dinner, the scent of the matoke wafting up from its pot and filling the air.  She squeezes his waist and then slips her hand under his shirt to palm over his bare skin.  “Though as that’s printed along the top, I’m sure that it qualifies as an obvious-“

“You have made a significant oversight,” he says, speaking over her but not without letting the corner of his mouth curl up.  “You appear to have failed to sufficiently fill your week.”

“I know.”

“I believe that based upon this timetable, it is in fact possible for you to take an additional-“

“I’ve always liked a man with a good sense of humor,” she says, grabbing it back from him.  “Ho wants to meet after lunch on Fridays and there’s no other classes available afterwards that don’t conflict with her schedule, so…“

She shrugs, looking down at that blank spot on her schedule before squeezing his waist again and then crossing to her bag to slip the filmplast back into it.  She has two weeks until she needs to get it out again, and her padd too, and she might just leave her schoolbag hanging right there for the entire duration of break and pick it up again on the first Monday morning of the new semester and simply not think about it again before then.

“I’m not saying that I looked up your teaching schedule or anything,” she says as she closes her bag and walks back to the kitchen and the stove and her glass of wine, taking a sip from it and leaning back against the counter.   “And I’m also not saying that I found out that you don’t teach a Friday afternoon class, but I might have.”

“Is that so?” he asks as he begins to wipe extra flour from the table, managing to do so without letting any sprinkle on the floor.

“You’ll probably have meetings,” she says and decides that the short distance from the stove to his table is really entirely too much, so she abandons it in favor of moving closer to him again, sliding her hands up his arms and feeling the muscles work as he keeps wiping the table.  It doesn’t take him long to leave the cloth laying there and instead turn around and let his hands come up to spread warmth over her back.  She leans against them, letting him hold her up.  

“Not always,” he says and it makes her smile again.

“Good,” she says, smoothing her hands over his uniform and tipping her face up to be kissed, wondering as he bends down to her if this will ever be commonplace or if it will always feel like it does now, too absolutely and utterly perfect to be anything close to real.

While the pot continues to simmer and she shows Spock how to roll out the dough into the appropriately sized discs, she showers and dresses in the clothes she grabbed that morning from what she hadn’t packed yet, her suitcase left gaping open on her bed as she had gotten ready for her final day of the term.  She leaves her uniform in Spock’s hamper, happy to let it wait for her until classes start again, a day that she doesn’t have to bother to think about right now, not when it seems far enough away to not even begin to matter, to have no bearing on the evening or dinner or standing there barefoot in his bedroom with the scent of food floating in the room.  Though she can’t help but wish that she had thought to bring other shoes than her boots, frowning down at her feet and wiggling her toes against the floor before deciding that she doesn’t really need them in the first place, since they’re hardly going out tonight.  Tomorrow, she can pack whatever sandals and heels she wants, nothing that resembles plain black boots in the slightest, choosing both from her own closet and Gaila’s as well, her belongings more or less shoved in there as she had left in a swirl of half packed luggage, engineering texts, and a promise that Nyota really doesn’t need her to keep that she’d bring back a souvenir.

The kitchen is nearly entirely clean when she gets back and she gives him a grin, tucking her hair back behind her ears and nudging him away from where he’s putting away dishes.

“This is going to be messy,” she tells him as she begins transferring the rolled out dough to the kitchen, pouring oil into a pan and setting it over the stove.  “Messier,” she qualifies.  “Go change, you’re not going to be able to bear to watch.”

When she’s done frying each piece, she leaves them out to cool and wipes flour and spattered oil from his counter before he can, leaving him dabbing at a spot of flour that’s dusted over the sleeve of the black sweater he put on.  She leans back against the counter with her wine glass, once again full, curled in her hand, watching him clean every speck off.

“I like those pants,” she tells him, mostly wanting to find out how they feel on him rather than just staring at how they fit, but dinner’s nearly ready and she’s not entirely sure that if she were to reach out and snag the waist of them that she’d get herself to stop.

“Thank you.”

“Did you have to reorganize your whole closet?” she asks, taking a sip from her glass and then giving it to him when he holds his hand out for it.  He makes the same expression he always does when he tries one of her drinks, like it’s not bad enough to actually say anything, but that he clearly doesn’t understand the appeal.  She takes it back from him and sips at it again, smiling at him over the rim, feeling that bubble of happiness rise up in her like it so often does now.   “Were your uniforms shocked that you how have twice as many civilian clothes?  Or is it three times as many?  I’m glad we weren’t in Mojave any longer that weekend, you would have had to do laundry.”

“It would be accurate to posit that you would have compelled us to leave before that could occur, due mostly to the likelihood that any long spent there would have increased the chances of suffering side effects by not having access to your padd.  Are you entirely sure you will be able to tolerate the recess between semesters?”

“Well,” she says and sets her glass on the counter, walking towards him and grabbing him by the hips, unable to convince herself to keep her hands off of him for any longer, not when she can press him back against the sink and let his hands on her waist pull her into him.  The fabric of his pants is softer than she might have expected and she’ll ask to make sure that he packs them, some other time when his lips aren’t already tugging at hers, making it hard to think.  Tonight, later, maybe, or tomorrow morning, since she’s sure that he hasn’t started to set clothes aside yet, not with the hunt for groceries she sent him on yesterday, the work he had to finish to be able to take time off, and the realization that he didn’t actually have enough civilian clothes to be gone from work for more than a couple days.  “Maybe if I have a suitable distraction.”

“I would not be opposed,” he says as he kisses her again.

She drags his hips even closer and lets her eyes fall shut, lets out a sigh against his cheek as he keeps kissing her like that, again and again, his nose brushing against hers as he changes angles, his hands firm and solid on her sides, her back.  She’s gives into the urge to let her fingers creep up under under his shirt, and is fingering the dip of his spine and letting him bite at her bottom lip when there’s a knock at the door.

She runs her fingers through her hair where his hands were tangled in it as he readjusts his sweater, tugging it back down and smoothing it over his stomach before he goes to answer the door and she takes the last moment they have alone to let herself examine the view she has of his pants as he walks away from her.

“Smells amazing,” Puri announces without bothering to say hello, tossing his jacket on Spock’s coat rack and hanging up Stoyer’s far more carefully.

“Hi, how were finals?” Stoyer asks, crossing to the kitchen and folding Nyota into a hug.  “You survived, it seems.”

“Not too bad,” Nyota answers as Puri hugs her too, much harder and nearly threatening to lift her off the ground.

“We brought a chocolate cake with chocolate icing,” he says, his arm still slung over her shoulders as he points to a covered plate he left on the counter.

“It is not,” Stoyer corrects.  “It’s a pie.  Or it’s supposed to be. It turns out Puri can’t make pies, so it’s a bit of a disaster.”

“A delicious disaster,” he says and lets go of Nyota only to pick up the bottle of wine, examine the label, and then start opening and closing cupboards, one right after the next.  “Thanks for offering me a glass of wine, Spock, don’t mind if I do.”

“Nice place,” Stoyer says, looking around herself.  “Thanks for having us over.”

“It is the same layout as your faculty quarters,” Spocks says as he pulls a wineglass from one of the only shelves Puri hasn’t looked in yet and Nyota tries to decide if imagining this moment left her at all prepared for the reality of living it out, Stoyer and Puri in the rooms that she and Spock spend so much time in alone, the apartment suddenly full of noise in a way that it nearly never is.  It’s nice, she decides, curling her toes into the floor.  Perfect, maybe, she thinks as Puri fills up his glass and Stoyer goes to examine Spock’s ka’athyra and Spock’s eyes meet hers, making her smile like it always does whenever he looks at her like that.

“What’s this?” Puri asks, following Stoyer.  He sets his wineglass on the coffee table and picks up the small book there, the actual, paper copy of the journal with her paper in it that Spock had surprised her with only the other week.  He had called it an early present for the illogical tradition of giving material gifts at Terran holidays, and when she had taken it from him, the bright burst of his happiness that had shot through her fingers had said everything she had heard beneath his words.  Puri flips it open and pulls out their bookmark, stuck between the pages like it was when Spock had given it to her and she had covered her mouth like she could have possibly kept her delighted laugh from escaping through her fingers.  “I don’t get it.  Uhura, N.  2256.  Trends in Sociolinguistic something or other, Journal of your field that has an unnecessarily long title.  Why’d you write that on a postcard?”

“That does not belong to you,” Spock says, reaching for it even as Puri pulls it away.

“I’m reading this,” he says, paging through the first half of her paper.  “It’s good.  All about how humans shouldn’t have so many off the wall phrases.”

“I am pleased to know that, as ever, you find yourself amusing.”

“I’m a riot,” he says as he sinks onto the couch and turns back to the beginning, his eyes moving over the introduction that she had written months ago, back when the weather was warmer and the days were long.  Now, evening has edged into Spock’s apartment and Nyota flips on a lamp as she walks back into the kitchen.

“So,” Stoyer says, following her.  “I heard a rumor that someone is meeting someone else’s parents.”

“I heard that too,” Puri calls from the couch.

“Maybe,” Nyota says, tucking her hair back and smiling into the pot as she slowly stirs it.  Spock must have said something, then, because she’s been in the library for what felt like weeks even though the calendar told her it was only days, the final push of the semester seeming to drag out longer and longer the more she wanted it to be over.  “This is ready.”

“I’m starving,” Puri says and abandons the journal on the couch, dropping the postcard on top of it as he crosses to the table.  Spock picks them both up and replaces the postcard where it goes, marking the start of her paper, and sets them both on his desk where they keep it, next to the framed hologram that always sits there.

“You just had a rib eye, dear,” Stoyer says, setting out the plates that Nyota has handed to her.

“I wasn’t sure that Spock wouldn’t force us to have an entire dinner of salad,” he whispers to Nyota, grabbing her glass along with his own and bringing both them and the bottle of wine to the table.

“He made couscous last week,” she whispers back as Spock pretends to not listen to them.  

“Progress.  And Spock, I would give you sage and timely advice about charming Terran families,” Puri says as Stoyer sets the pot on the table and Nyota places the chapati next to it.  “But Arlene’s mother still gets this very particular look whenever I’m around.  I’m assuming it’s one of love and familial devotion, but something tells me it’s more along the lines of indigestion.”

“Do you need a glass?” Nyota asks, realizing as Stoyer sits that that there isn’t a wineglass in front of her place setting already.

Stoyer gives a small shakes of her head and it’s not until she adds, “No, but thank you,” that Nyota realizes the gesture is not directed at Puri.

“Are you sure?” she asks, already halfway turning back to the kitchen to get one.

“Absolutely,” Puri says, his smile wide and something in his voice that makes Nyota turn back towards the table and makes Spock pause where he’s starting to spoon matoke onto Stoyer’s plate.  

“What-“ Nyota starts as Stoyer gives Puri a hard look and he shrugs, still smiling entirely too broadly, his eyes dancing as Stoyer shakes her head again.

“I am sworn to secrecy,” Puri says.  “I am not saying anything.  Arlene will kill me.”

“I will not,” Stoyer says and she’s smiling too, just a little.

“Her hoard of assistants will find me in my sleep,” Puri says.  “Also, we haven’t gotten a hold of her folks yet, so there’s that, too.”

“I have one assistant, as ever,” Stoyer says as Puri leans over and kisses her temple.  It looks like they’re holding hands under the table and Nyota takes a step back towards the table and then another one, her hands finding the back of her chair and holding onto it.  Spock is still frozen with his hand on the spoon and the other holding Stoyer’s plate, though his eyes come up to meet Nyota’s.

“You know nothing,” Puri tells both of them.  “I barely know anything.  I’m still surprised I was allowed to find out before the future maternal grandparents do.”

“It’s a girl,” Stoyer says as she takes the spoon from Spock and keeps dishing dinner onto her plate.  He lets her slip the plate away from him too, settling back in his chair and Nyota thinks she should also be sitting down, or at least something doing other than just staring at the two of them, both of them still smiling wider than she’s ever seen.  “I’m due in June.  Hopefully after the semester wraps up.”

“That new building they’re putting up behind the gym?” Puri asks as he hands Stoyer his plate.  “Arlene just got the Academy to approve it as a nursery.”

“I did not, it’s a new dorm.”

“The entire incoming class is going to be babysitting.  It’s a required course now,” Puri says.  He takes his plate back and sets it in front of him, examining his food.  When he looks up, his eyes and antenna travel between Nyota and Spock.  “You two should say something.”

“That’s incredible,” Nyota gets out.

“Congratulations,” Spock says and to Nyota’s surprise, he reaches out and touches his fingers to the back of Stoyer’s hand where it’s resting next to her fork.

“Thank you,” Stoyer says, giving him a soft smile.  Nyota sits down slowly and Stoyer gives her a smile too, one that Nyota returns as Stoyer begins digging into her dinner.

“This,” Puri says, waving a plantain around on his fork, Spock’s eyes leaving Stoyer to track the motion like it’s about to fly off and leave some mark on his otherwise pristine apartment, “Is not as exciting as Spock going home with you.  Tomorrow, right?  Are you ready for this, Spock?  Did you, you know, prepare?  Cause you know not to mention that time that we-”

“-I am aware.”  He’s been telling her for weeks now that he’s not nervous, that she needn’t bother asking, and she’s taken to letting him think that rather than pressing the topic, not pointing out how often it arises or the questions he’ll bring up out of the blue, when she’s buried in her work and his mind is obviously preoccupied.

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”  Puri points the plantain at Spock.  “Eat anything they serve you.”

“Eat what I serve you,” Nyota says, watching as Spock picks at his plate before trying a bite, his forehead slightly too furrowed.

“It is good,” he says and takes a larger forkful and then, as she watches, another one.

“Are you staying there for the whole break?” Stoyer asks.  “This is delicious, Uhura.”

“Thank you,” Nyota says, even though it doesn’t taste quite the same as when her grandfather makes it.  “And no, only for a couple days.”

“Logical,” Puri declares before taking a huge bite.  “Get in and get the hell out of dodge.  I knew you two were smart.”

“You’re not coming back to work, I hope,” Stoyer says.

“We are going to visit India,” Spock says and when he reaches past her for the plate of chapati, his arm leaves a wash of warmth against hers.  “Until the beginning of the new semester.”

“It’s really one of the most linguistically diverse areas left on Earth, since even with the adaptation of Standard, the region continued to hold onto the heritage of- Sorry.” She clears her throat and takes another bite of her dinner, catching Puri’s all too amused smile at how quickly she was talking.  “It’s… exciting.”

Spock touches her hand lightly, a sparkling prickle left over the back of her fingers.  “Do not apologize.”

“Are you trying to learn all of them?”  Puri asks.

“Going to,” Nyota says with a smile, her hand finding Spock’s knee under the table before she picks up her fork again.

“I’ve never been,” Stoyer says as she takes the plate of chapati from Spock.  “Any big plans?”

“We’re going to go see Everest and go to the beach,” she says, suddenly realizing she’s not sure if Spock swims or not.  She’ll find out, though, and he didn’t protest when she had told him that she wanted to spend a significant amount of their vacation laying in the sun and doing nothing.  They can build structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing and very logical sandcastles, maybe, and try to entirely forget about the Academy and Starfleet and the semester waiting for them halfway around the world.

“And?” Stoyer prompts.

“Eat,” Nyota adds and shrugs because beyond reserving shuttle tickets and letting her parents know how long to expect them for, they haven’t really made plans.  “A lot.”

“No extensive fieldwork opportunities?” Puri asks, dishing himself more matoke from the pot and putting more on Stoyer’s plate, too, filling in what she’s already eaten.  “Where’s the part when you two discover an ancient language and rewrite Earth’s linguistic history in an afternoon?”

“It may be wise to dedicate more than a single afternoon.”

“A day or two,” she says lightly, putting her fork down again so that she can touch Spock’s forearm with the back of her knuckles.  “So we don’t have to rush.”

“Well, speaking of traveling,” Stoyer says, “Though not of beaches - careful, Uhura, I might just join you, it sounds fantastic - we want to ask you two something and you don’t have to say yes and you don’t have to answer right now.”

“You do have to say yes,” Puri corrects.  “Though we’ll give you until dessert to let us know how completely excited you both are.  Mostly you, Spock.”

It’s hard to take her hand from his arm so she doesn’t bother, and it’s even better when he takes her hand in his and pulls it into his lap, his thumb moving gently over hers and his eyes flicking to meet hers and then back to Puri, who’s smiling again, and Stoyer who’s spearing another plantain with her fork.

“We’re going to Andor right before the beginning of the fall semester.  With a newborn,” Stoyer says, briefly closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.  “It’s going to be great.  And if you want, you two should come.”

“That’s…” Nyota starts, looking over at Spock, feeling his fingers tighten on hers even though he hasn’t otherwise reacted, his eyes still moving between the two of them, until his attention finally settles on Stoyer.

“We won’t even make you babysit,” Stoyer quickly adds.  “Please come, I need all the help I can get.  There are hot springs and I’m going to insist that there are vegetables, and Spock, Puri’s family loves you and wants to see you again, they ask about you all the time.”

“That could be fun,” Nyota says, squeezing Spock’s hand in return and enjoying that tickle that spreads over her skin.  She tries to imagine if he’ll want to, really, and if she does, if she can even picture that far into the future with any clarity, when she hasn’t even begun to think of much else other than getting through the coming semester.  And their vacation, having Spock entirely to herself for two weeks, which makes her squeeze his hand again.

“Isn’t that your anniversary?” Puri asks as he refills his wineglass and Nyota pauses with her own halfway to her mouth, her hand still tucked into Spock’s as she exchanges a look with him.  “Over the summer sometime?  You’re supposed to do something for those, Spock.”

“I am aware,” Spock says evenly and Nyota tries to hide her smile in her glass, works her thumb against his and wants to laugh or lean over and say something to Spock quietly, privately, though what it would be she’s not sure.  Something to draw out the twitch at the corner of his mouth, probably, something about how Stoyer hasn’t looked up from her plate and Puri is still talking as she and Spock sit there, their hands twined together and his eyes flicking towards hers again.

“I can give you pointers,” Puri offers.

“That will not be necessary,” Spock says smoothly.

“Think about it,” Stoyer tells them both.  “It would be wonderful if you came.”

As Nyota brushes her teeth that night, she stares into the mirror and listens to the faint sounds of Spock putting away the last of the dishes.  She had left him rinsing the silverware and with the glasses to put on the top shelf, up where she still can’t reach.  A while ago, he had taken to leaving a glass for her down where he keeps the bowls, and she’s more than once threatened to reorganize his entire kitchen without real intention to ever do so.

Another year, she thinks, of needing to stretch if she wants a second glass.  Another year and a couple months after that and she will have graduated and gotten her commission and received her first posting, and his assignment to the Academy will be behind him, and these rooms will be as empty as his office is, left like an artifact of their past, traded for the promise of white corridors and displays backlit in blue and, as he comes up behind her as she rinses out her mouth, that steady, solid warmth that always rises up in her whenever he’s near.

“We should go to Andor,” she tells him as they push the blankets back on the bed and crawl beneath them.  She scoots close to him and he lifts the sheet in invitation so that she can curl into his side and lay her head on his chest, her hand finding the place where his heart beats in his side.

“You would like to?”

“Maybe,” she says.  “If you do.”

“I may.” He pulls the blanket back up to his waist, settling it over her as well.  She picks lightly at his shirt, rubbing the fabric in her fingers and feeling his eyes on her, so that she’s not surprised when she looks up at him and finds him watching her hand.  His eyes move to her face and she shifts so that she can better see him, propping herself up on her arm, her head resting in her palm.

“Andor is pretty near Vulcan,” she says, which he knows, which might be why he doesn’t react, but probably isn’t.

“I had intended to inform you of that fact,” he says and she’s so surprised that her hand stills where she’s been exploring the shape of his ribs beneath his shirt.

“You were?”

“And that there are other sights of interest in the near vicinity.  You speak Circinian.  Omicron Circini II is not far.”

“What are you suggesting?” she asks, sitting up even further, laying her hand over his stomach and shifting so that she can sit beside him, her legs crossed and her knee bumping against his hip.  It messes up the blankets that he just finished arranging and she’s tired from finals and a long day and the wine that Puri kept pouring her, but she doesn’t get to spend every night like this, hours stretching unplanned before them and no schedule to keep.  It’s precious to her, really, these times that they have together, too few and too far between, never quite enough to satisfy her so that she’s always left waiting for more of him, nearly entirely sure that she might never get her fill.  It makes her keep her hand on him and blink back the heavy drag of the late hour in favor of having him laying there next to her, staring up at her from his pillow.

“I am simply remarking on the relative positions of M-class planets in the Alpha Quadrant.”  He adjusts the blankets again, smoothing them where they’ve fallen rumpled next to her thigh, and then finding her knee with his hand like he did at dinner, like he does often now, more time than not whenever they sit together on his couch, or manage to find time to share a meal, his hand falling there and staying, spreading warmth straight through her in a way that she hopes never stops.  “And,” he says, his fingers circling her knee, “Due to Puri’s obviously successful relationship, it would be illogical to not take his advice.”

“Can I tell him you said that?”

“No.”

“Can you believe they’re having a baby?”

“No,” he says and then corrects himself, shaking his head lightly and saying, “Yes.”

“I can’t either.”  She takes her bottom lip in her teeth, trying to picture it, Puri and Stoyer as parents of a tiny infant.  It’s easier to picture than she might have imagined and she’s not the only one with a bursting excitement over the prospect, since whether or not Spock will ever say anything about it, she can feel his delight spreading thick and sweet where his fingers rest on her skin.

She smiles and leans down enough to kiss him once, quickly, hardly what she really wants to do with her hand on his stomach and him staring up at her like that, his eyes slowly opening again, but she can’t help but point out, “Are you going to tell him when our anniversary actually is?”

“No.”

“Is it because you don’t actually know?”

“Perhaps,” he says and she has to smile because she doesn’t either, would be completely unable to pick a single day and might not even want to, not when she would have to choose one above all the rest.

She smooths her hand up to his breastbone and back down again.  “Good.”

“You do not want me to inform him?”

“I like that it’s just ours.  All of that,” she says and would explain further, would detail to him what she means, but he nods and she scratches her fingers lightly across his stomach and nods too and leans down to kiss him again.

When she sits up again, there’s a slight spark in his eyes, one that makes her smile at him, or maybe she was doing that anyway.  She often feels like she’s never stopped, not really, a joy constantly sitting in her that she has to push down during classes and meetings so that she doesn’t just sit there and stare into some distance, a happiness that started a long time ago, longer than she’s sure that she really knows.

“It would, however,” he starts, and takes his hand from her knee to lightly touch her knuckles, “Be logical to account for the fact that he will will certainly remind me many times between now and the summer and it would be similarly rational to have an idea of what I am planning as soon as possible.”

“You have something in mind?” she asks, smoothing her hand over his stomach again and then again after that.  

“I had intended to ask you regardless,” he says, his stomach twitching under her touch.  “I fully anticipate you may already have looked at courses you wish to take over the summer, but my parents have been requesting that I return home before the Enterprise departs and I had thought that I might be persuaded to, if you were there.  Andor is not far, as you are aware, and it would be an opportunity to-”

“Yes.”

He blinks.  “That was simpler to convince you of than I had anticipated.”

She laces her fingers through his and tugs at his hand.  “What was your fully thought out and very logically persuasive argument going to be?”

He answers immediately and without hesitation, very nearly smiling.  “That while such a trip would foreclose an opportunity for course work, it might provide one for you to gather a significant amount of linguistic data, and that now that you have completed one paper, doing so again will likely be quite a bit easier and take less time, leaving you able to complete it while enjoying a vacation as well.”

“Really,” she says slowly, maybe surprised that he had taken the time to figure all that out, or maybe just needing the moment to let it sink in, the idea of it, something she might not have thought she wanted until she heard him say it, now growing brighter the longer she thinks about it.

“If you were in need of an advisor, I would be willing to offer my services.”

“Is that so?” she asks, her mind ticking over the idea as his other hand covers theirs where they’re linked on his chest, her hand trapped between his body and the warmth of his palm.

“And that perhaps if you will accompany me traveling for our anniversary this year, then you can then be responsible for arranging the following year,” he says which pulls her thoughts from school and work to settle on him instead, the quiet way he said that and how he’s holding her hand like that.

With her other one, she brushes his hair back, staring down at him, sure that someday her mind will catch up with everything about this, about him, will make sense of it all and she won’t be constantly left dazed by the enormity of it all, but for now she just gives into enjoying it, letting the warmth of his words surge through her and leave her slightly amazed in their wake.  “I’m really in charge of our second anniversary?”

“That is what I suggested, yes.”

She leans over him and kisses his cheek.  “And you’ll do the third?”

“Yes,” he says, a ghost of a smile playing over his mouth.  She kisses that too until he softly kisses her back.

“And I’ll do the fourth?”

“Your abilities to detect patterns are exemplary,” he says, pressing his head back into the pillow enough to be able to look up at her.

She tugs at his fingers, letting their linked hands rest between them.

“What happens after our fourth anniversary?”

“I suppose that we will have a fifth.”

“And then?” she asks, touching her lips to his mouth, his chin, his cheek, smiling when he does, pushing her nose next to his and kissing him again lightly.

“A sixth.”

“And then?” she asks, letting her mouth linger against his, their lips brushing and his breath on her face.

“And then I will be forced to recommend you repeat your mathematics training if you are unable to deduce what comes a year after a sixth anniversary.”

“I love you more than you can possibly know,” she whispers, moving back enough to be able to stare down at him.

“Truly?” he asks and she smiles, still leaning over him, already picturing how she’s about to kiss him again.  She can see the rest of their evening too, and the next few days they have together and the weeks after that, the months and years even, unfurling out in front of them in a way that is nearly too much to imagine.  It makes her ache with the thought of it, makes a laugh threaten to bubble up with everything she can’t begin to contain.  She cups his cheek in her hand, his eyes a soft, clear brown as he watches her and she bends down to him, filled with the thought that they’re here now at the beginning of it all, just on the precipice of everything that hangs there, stretching out entirely too bright and golden and waiting for them.

...

_The End_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you to everyone: albinofrog for proofreading, Sam for being the recipient of long winded emails, all the cheerleading here, cheerleading on tumblr, all of your wonderful questions and comments that created an experience around this story that was truly and absolutely exceptional. I often feel that we all started this together 41 chapters ago and that this story grew to what it is as a result of the love you all had for it, the engagement it spurred, and the care with which it was read. I’m sad for it to be at an end, happy that it’s now out in the world to be enjoyed in its entirety, and proud of what it became over the months it took to create, a final product that is better for every comment, kudos, favorite, and message in my inbox. Thank you all so, so much for the experience that this was, and I hope this story continues to be as loved into the future as it has been since I took a deep breath and posted chapter 1, wondering if anyone would come join me on this long and winding ride.


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